Do you need an SSD for gaming?

The appeal of high-speed SSDs (solid-state drives, for those unfamiliar) is powerful, especially when load times are slowing down your entire team between rounds of Rainbow Six: Siege. Your randomly matched squadmates shout ‘SSD' in text chat, well aware that your aging hard drive is slowing them down.

Enter solid-state drives (SSDs), which were popular in the early 2010s. Although this new type of drive had been around for decades before being introduced to the general public, their more complicated design and smaller physical size rendered them too costly for ordinary use. SSDs were perfect for laptops and quiet PCs since they had no moving parts and could achieve much higher speeds.

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There are three sorts of drives available now for use in custom PC construction. M.2 SSDs (also known as NVMe drives) are expensive but incredibly fast and small, whereas 3.5-inch HDDs are the biggest and cheapest. Between the two are 2.5-inch SSDs. We won't delve into more exotic drive types here, but if you're looking for something extremely high-tech, Intel's Optane drives are a good place to start.

Both 3.5-inch HDDs and 2.5-inch SSDs utilize the same power connections and use a SATA III cable to connect to the motherboard. They are frequently mounted on the same mounts within a PC chassis and are fastened with screws or clip-on drive trays. M.2 SSDs, on the other hand, are small strips of silicon and microchips that are mounted directly on the motherboard, often with a thermal shield to assist dissipate heat.

Regardless of the kind you choose, almost every PC case will have the capacity for several drives; keep in mind, however, that M.2 drives are excellent for tiny PCs since they require no additional power or connection connections and take up almost little space within the case. M.2 is frequently the ideal choice for assembling a super-small mini-ITX system, independent of other requirements.

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The SATA III interface (which is utilized by both HDDs and 2.5-inch SSDs) has a data speed limit of around 550MB/s. SATA SSDs will often reach this limit, but HDDs will usually languish at around 100MB/s, with better versions reaching rates of up to 200MB/s. While hard drives may potentially achieve greater speeds—Mach.2 Seagate's Exos 2X14 hard drive, for example, can transmit data at 524MB/s via a different interface—they're not suitable for gaming.

M.2 SSDs, on the other hand, are storage speed devils. These cards, which plug directly into the motherboard, employ a PCIe interface (usually PCIe 3.0 or 4.0, depending on the PC) to achieve transfer rates measured in gigabytes per second rather than megabytes per second.

The average PCIe 3.0 SSD, also known as Gen3 SSDs, will have transfer rates of 1.5 to 3.5 GB/s. Gen3 M.2 drives are compatible with the overwhelming majority of contemporary motherboards and CPUs, and they are already significantly quicker than anything utilizing a SATA connection.

Faster speeds are available with Gen4 M.2 SSDs (those that use the newer PCIe 4.0 interface), which generally range between 5 and 7GB/s. These drives are ideal for someone who often moves huge quantities of data, however, they are more expensive than PCIe 3.0 SSDs and require a PCIe 4.0-compatible PC to operate at maximum speed.

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To back to the original topic, is an SSD required for gaming? Yes, in a nutshell, however, it's essential to think about your specific needs before making a purchase. Much switching from an HDD to a 2.5-inch SSD can increase game boot and load speeds significantly, with M.2 SSDs providing even greater performance.

It's worth mentioning that a better drive won't necessarily improve the performance of your games. Framerates and texture loading are dependent on other components (most notably your CPU and GPU), thus a 2.5-inch SSD will enough if you don't mind minor loading delays now and then.

Nowadays, these drives are relatively inexpensive, with 1TB of storage from a reputable manufacturer costing approximately $100. A tiny SATA SSD is an excellent alternative if you're constructing a gaming PC on a low budget; you can purchase a 240GB drive for about $40.

Things get a little more difficult with M.2 drives. While they have gotten substantially less expensive in recent years, they are still more expensive than SATA drives and have a wider range of performance. When deciding which M.2 SSD to buy, keep in mind that certain models aren't capable of reaching the format's claimed maximum speeds.