Why ssd for gaming

If you are tired of waiting on your games to load, installing an SSD gets you into your game faster. SSDs can be bounced around and still keep your important files and information safe. Designed to reliably store your data for years, SSDs offer additional shock and vibration resistance for travel-tested durability if you are gaming on a laptop. That humming sound you heard when using a hard drive?

That can help keep overall system temps down. If you game on a laptop, SSDs can increase the life of your battery. Speed, capacity, noise, durability, temperature, and efficiency all make SSDs the preferred choice for gaming. Please consider upgrading to the latest version of your browser by clicking one of the following links.

Learn how using a solid state drive SSD for gaming can result in faster load times and an improved gaming experience. When building or buying a new gaming PC, your choice of storage matters. Do SSDs have benefits beyond improving boot times? Install sizes have grown in recent years, with recent titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare taking up over GB by themselves.

Why do game install sizes continue to increase? Although developers use image compression algorithms to reduce the size of stored assets, more high-res textures still mean more space used.

The Unreal 4 engine, for example, specifies that a single 4K texture may take up Games vary in the ways in which they compress art assets, video, and audio. Because decompressing assets like audio files creates more work for the CPU, developers have sometimes chosen to use uncompressed assets increasing install size so that their game runs smoother on lower-spec machines. While not every game takes up as much space as Modern Warfare or Red Dead Redemption 2 GB , AAA titles will likely continue to grow in install size as the quality and complexity of assets increases.

Some players only want a couple of titles installed on their gaming PC at a time, while others will want several terabytes of space to manage their game library and save gameplay highlights. HDDs use moving parts. Inside an HDD, an actuator arm moves over circular tracks on a spinning platter to retrieve or save data. Both drives still use the same Samsung Phoenix controller, which means they can outperform the competition in real-world usage.

If you want peak PCIe 3. The GB EVO is still a great drive, smartly specced, well-made, and with a more competitive price. And the Crucial MX is most definitely that. With a full terabyte of storage, and performance at the limit of the SATA interface it's a quality drive.

But, as there is a hard limit on the number of M. And the Crucial MX is one of the best. It will happily function as a boot drive on systems with no M. You will still be missing out on the zippy response of your operating system running on the SSD-specific NVMe protocol, but if that's not an option anyway, this drive will see you right. But the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is one of the fastest around, and yet is still not a huge amount more expensive than an equivalent PCIe 3.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus was one of the first drives to use the new Phison E18 controller; the follow up to the immensely popular Phison E16 controller found in basically every first-gen PCIe 4. No, seriously, that's the controller you'll find in everything from the Corsair MP to the Gigabyte Aorus to the Addlink S90 as well as plenty of Sabrent's own drives.

It's incredibly fast basically, and on paper at least, the fastest drive to be released so far. On to the performance, and it's here where Sabrent's latest drive impresses almost effortlessly, especially when it comes to the synthetic throughput.

The sequential read and write figures in both benchmarks are impressive, but it's the write performance that stands out most, leaving the competition eating dust. And more or less for the same price. Even if you're currently not running a PCIe 4. Crucial is one of the big names in affordable solid state storage, but has been notably slow at getting us a new PCIe 4. And, also importantly, it can easily outperform any PCIe 3.

Even if you're not running a motherboard with a PCIe 4. Since the first Gen4 SSDs launched there has been a quite significant price premium as a barrier to entry, and with the P5 Plus that has come down a hell of a lot. Using parent company, Micron's latest NAND flash memory, and it's own in-house controller, Crucial has been able to keep costs down and performance up.

In the rarefied air of PCIe 4. Read our full Crucial P5 Plus review. When the cheapest 2. Although Gen4 M. Gen4 drives can be quite expensive, especially for higher-capacity SSDs i.

This varies between brands, but if you want an M. For many, this will be a question of future-proofing. You need a motherboard and processor with PCIe 4. Ultimately, my recommendation comes down to cost versus need. If you want a cheap and easy upgrade to your HDD, a 2.