As today's AAA games demand ever more computing resources, PC gamers are hard-pressed to upgrade their components to keep pace. They need speed; they need space. Replacing a primary solid-state drive (your boot drive), adding secondary storage, or both can help keep your rig as current as possible. And on the upside: Unlike graphics cards and some other PC parts, SSDs haven't seen their relative prices skyrocket over the last few years.

Which SSD to buy, though, is the tricky bit. With laptops and desktops of different eras, there's no one-size-fits-all PC-gaming SSD solution. Your choice of a gaming SSD depends largely on what kind of computer you are updating, what type of (and how many) drive slots or drive bays it has, or even what flavor of USB-C port it may have. The latest internal PCI Express 4.0 M.2 SSDs are mainstays for snappy PC gaming, but not all PCs have slots to support them. Fortunately, you can find good solid-state storage solutions even for less-than-current systems.

The first PCI Express 5.0 M.2 SSDs have hit the market over the past year, and although they've achieved blistering speeds in our testing and produced excellent results in the 3DMark Storage gaming-centric benchmark, to use one at the speeds they are intended, you pretty much have to buy or build a whole new rig with the latest parts around it. They require heavy-duty heatsinks, and it may be a long time (if ever) until we see one that's usable in a laptop.

We've outlined our favorite tested SSDs for PC gaming below. After the picks below, we've whipped up a guide with everything you need to know to about buying the right SSD for your gaming PC.

In recent years, we've seen amazing advances in raw SSD transfer speeds (as measured by the Crystal DiskMark benchmark), especially with some of the latest PCI Express 4.0 NVMe internal drives. (If you're not up on SSD acronyms and abbreviations, check out our glossary of SSD terminology.) In sequential read and write testing—which measures throughput for best-case, straight-line transfers of large files—today's PCIe 4.0 read speeds can exceed (and write speeds can approach) a scorching 7,000 megabits per second (MBps) with drives on an optimized PC. This is all well and good, and raw speed can help bolster both all-around and game-specific performance.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Speed is most important for a boot drive, which holds your PC's operating system and from which games have traditionally been run. Secondary drives, whether internal or external, have tended to be slower and have higher capacity—they're often used to hold game libraries—but you can get a fast, high-capacity secondary drive and run games from it if you have the right expansion slot and are willing to pay the price.

More important than raw throughput, however, is how quickly a drive can load games. Our testing with UL's PCMark 10 measures the load speeds of the internal SSDs we review for three AAA games: Battlefield 5, Overwatch, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4. Crystal DiskMark also measures read and write speeds for 4K-block-size files (a common trait of program-level files in gaming-loading scenarios).

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

The newest SSD test in our arsenal, UL's 3DMark Gaming Benchmark, measures installation, loading, playing, saving, and/or copying speeds for various top-tier titles including the abovementioned trio, plus The Outer Worlds and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. We've bolstered our test-results database by running this new benchmark on recent drives we have had in house, and will be running it on all gaming and general-purpose internal and external SSDs reviewed from now on.

Should I Get an Internal SSD, or an External SSD?

People shopping for the best SSD for a gaming computer generally look to internal drives using the M.2 "stick of gum" form factor. PCI Express 4.0 NVMe SSDs offer the fastest throughput speeds (and generally the best overall performance based on our testing), but your system may not have an M.2 slot that supports that bus type. Although PCIe 4.0 SSDs are backward-compatible with motherboards that support PCI Express 3.0, to get anything like their rated peak speeds, you'll need a motherboard and chipset that supports PCI Express 4.0. (For much more on the nuances of M.2, see our deep-dive roundup on the Best M.2 SSDs.)

(Credit: Molly Flores)

PCI Express 4.0 support is found on late-model desktop motherboards for AMD Ryzen processors, as well as Intel Z590-chipset-and later boards designed for 10th Generation-and-later Intel desktop processors. Intel's 12th Gen "Alder Lake" platform and later, as well as the latest AMD motherboards with AM5 sockets, also support the latest PCI Express spec, PCI Express 5.0, which effectively doubles the bandwidth of PCIe 4.0 and offers approximately double the sequential read and write speeds of the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

The very important thing to bear in mind, though, with PCIe 5.0 is that just because a motherboard and its chipset may support the PCIe 5.0 bus, it does not mean the board is necessarily equipped with a PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot for SSDs. Some late-model boards with the latest chipsets may not actually have a 5.0 M.2 slot you can leverage, only PCIe 4.0-capable ones. Or a motherboard may have support for a PCIe 5.0-capable PCIe-card expansion card (for graphics cards, and the like), but no PCIe 5.0-capable M.2 slot. One does not guarantee the presence of the other. Examine the board specs carefully!

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

PCIe 4.0 slots and support are widespread on recent motherboards, and you can still find plenty of capable M.2 SSDs supporting the older PCIe 3.0 bus that have done well in our games testing. So even if you have an older motherboard with only M.2 PCIe 3.0 slots, it's still worth considering an upgrade if you're still rocking a platter hard drive. And even if you don't have a spare M.2 slot (or any at all), a motherboard port with the familiar Serial ATA (SATA) interface can help by hosting a secondary 2.5-inch SATA SSD, or even a hard drive, for game storage.

Another option for secondary storage is an external SSD, which can provide additional capacity for holding games. You don't need an open M.2 slot or SATA port, just a spare USB port. Just be sure that your gaming PC has the proper interface to fully support the drive you're eyeing: The fastest external SSDs offer USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 connectivity, with sequential read and write speeds up to 2,000MBps.

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

The catch is that few computers natively support Gen 2x2, so you may need to add an expansion card that supports the standard. Plugged into most of today's PCs, such a drive will default to USB 3.2 Gen 2, with peak read and write speeds of about 1,000MBps. That's still fine; just know what you're paying for and if you'll be able to leverage it to the fullest.

Old-School Speed: Should I Get a 2.5-Inch SATA Drive?

Depending on the age of your rig and what slots and internal ports you have available, a solid-state drive with the older SATA interface and 2.5-inch hard-drive-style design may be a sensible option. SATA SSDs' throughput can't hope to compare with those of PCI Express devices (they top out just around 550MB per second), but the best SATA drives do relatively well in game loading and 4K read/write testing, and they're still way faster than any hard drive. Their advantages are a low price and (often) relatively high capacity.

(Credit: Zlata Ivleva)

And don't count out platter drives just yet. Although this roundup is devoted to SSDs, which easily outstrip lumbering hard drives in overall speed and game-loading performance, platter-based drives still have a role in gaming. Because of their often enormous capacities and relatively low cost per gigabyte, hard drives can be great places to store game libraries, though as a first choice you wouldn't want to run games from such a drive if you care about load speeds. But for cheap raw storage of loads of seldom-played or legacy games, hard drives can still be handy.

SSD Heatsinks: Ways to Beat the Heat

When it comes to M.2 SSDs in particular, phrases like blazing fast or blistering speed can be literal. Gaming SSDs, especially some PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives rated at 5,000MBps or more, tend to generate a lot of heat. That can lead to "throttling" (slowdowns that help protect the drive from overheat damage) that can cause a performance hit and potentially reduce a drive's lifespan. Drive makers take a variety of approaches to heat management, ranging from firmware-based solutions to designing SSDs for reduced power consumption without slowing performance.

(Credit: Molly Flores)

Physical solutions include thin heat spreaders that are generally affixed to the top of M.2 SSDs with adhesive. Some are made from graphene, which has high thermal conductivity and can dissipate heat from across their surface area.

Also popular are more traditional heatsinks, most of which use multiple aluminum fins to increase surface area for heat dissipation. Heatsinks are often tall, making them practical only in desktops (which have room for airflow around the M.2 slots) rather than laptop PCs. Lately, drive manufacturers have been designing more-compact heatsinks to fit laptops. Some drives come with stuck-on or removable heatsinks, and others may offer aftermarket heatsinks as accessories. Looking ahead, the problem of heat dissipation is compounded for PCI Express 5.0 SSDs, with rated throughput speeds of up to 14,000MBps, nearly double that of the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSDs. These require heavy-duty (and generally large) cooling solutions.

(Credit: Tony Hoffman)

There's also another, more fleeting kind of cool worth addressing. Are you a desktop-PC upgrader? If the rest of your rig is tricked out with cool RGB lighting effects, there's no reason your solid-state drive shouldn't be, too. A handful of external and internal SSDs offer their own lighting effects, usually compatible with popular RGB control software. You'll just want to choose an M.2 slot or SATA drive bay for the drive that's visible from outside the case. (As pictured above, you can find external USB SSDs that have tricked-out lighting, too.)

So, Which SSD Should I Buy for My Gaming PC?

So there you have it: our picks for the best M.2 SSDs for gaming. plus a smattering of SATA options and USB externals. Whether you have a desktop or a laptop, and whether you're after an attached-heatsink design or one with blinged-out RGB lighting, you don't need a whole brand-new rig to kick up your gaming. One of these drives can do it. Below is a spec breakout of the top picks we outlined above. Roll down and dig on in.