Best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming in 2022

The best PCIe 4.0 SSD will send your gaming, productivity, and file transfer speeds to untold velocities. Whether you're looking to load into your games faster or edit some video files, they're a handy addition, but soon they'll be necessary if you want to keep up with new features like Windows 10 and Windows 11's DirectStorage.

If you're short on cash, we still recommend at least a 1TB drive these days. Game sizes are increasing, meaning 256GB and 512GB SSDs aren't cutting it anymore. It's better to have more storage than you need instead of constantly needing to prune your gaming library. Write performance generally improves with capacity, too, so that's another reason to go for a bigger drive.

To take advantage of these PCIe 4.0 SSDs, you'll need a PCIe 4.0 platform. That means having either an AMD Ryzen 3000- or 5000-series and X570 or B550 motherboards. Like the new Core i5 12600Kor Core i9 12900K, Intel CPUs have support for these SSDs with the Z690, H670, and B660 motherboards. Intel's older, 500-series motherboards, along with Rocket Lake CPUs like the Core i9 11900K and Core i5 11600K, support them too. These SSDs will still work in the PCIe 3.0 platform but expect performance to take a hit due to interface limitations.

We've exhaustedly tested all the PCIe 4.0 SSDs listed below. We do this to ensure they're up to our standards and worthy of recommendation.

Best PCIe 4.0 SSD for gaming

Western Digital has released some quality drives lately, with the SN750 being a mainstay of our best SSD for gaming guide and the likes of the SN550 offering incredible value for money. With the release of the SN850, Western Digital gets to add another trophy to its cabinet—the fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD around. Yup, this is as good as it gets for PCIe 4.0 SSDs right now.

A quick scan down this list would have you scratching your head a bit at this, as the Phison E18-powered Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus has higher quoted sequential read and write figures. And while it's true that the SN850 trails slightly in some of the synthetic benchmarks, we put more weight on the real-world tests, and here the SN850 is head and shoulders above anything else in this group test. It's the fastest at the FFXIV game load and PCMark10's full storage test, and it isn't exactly sluggish in straight throughput either—managing 5,920MB/s reads and 5,021MB/s writes in AS SSD.

It shouldn't come as much of a shock to discover that this incredible performance comes at a bit of a cost, particularly when compared to PCIe 3.0 drives, but price cuts are common and the premium for the latest tech isn't so bad anymore. It's also a toasty drive, hitting 77C in operation. This shouldn't be a problem in a well-ventilated case but maybe an issue in a more cramped system. Still, if you want the fastest drive around, this is it.

Read our full WD Black SN850 1TB review.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus was the first drive to hit our lab using the new Phison E18 controller, which is the follow-up to the immensely popular Phison E16 controller found in basically every first-gen PCIe 4.0 drive. Offering peak reads of 7,100MB/s and writes of 6,600MB/s, it's not only a major step up from the first generation of PCIe 4.0 drives but a notable improvement over the Samsung 980 Pro, especially in terms of write performance.

In testing, this performance was born out too, with the faster write performance dominating Samsung's drive in the write tests. Real-world performance didn't always tell the same story, although the differences between these top drives can be slight. Even so, you're looking at AS SSD hitting 5,868MB/s for reads and 5,630MB/s for writes. Impressive stuff.

An important factor here is that the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus is the cheapest of these second-generation drives. The performance is so close that it makes the Sabrent SSD the sensible choice if you don't need the absolute best performance around. This drive also runs cooler than the SN850, which may be a factor if you're looking for a drive for a cramped case.

Read our full Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB review.

Samsung has been the go-to brand for plenty of generations of SSD storage, so its first PCIe 4.0 offering was hotly anticipated. It managed to top the synthetic performance charts at release but didn't impress quite so much in the real-world tests and was too expensive. It has also seen its performance lead destroyed by the Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus and the WD Black SN850, pushing it into third place in most tests.

That said, this is still an impressive drive, and if you don't mind spending slightly over the odds for a second-generation PCIe 4.0 drive, you'll be rewarded with a speedy chunk of storage. It's much faster than the first generation drives in every synthetic test, although the improvements in the real world can be marginal. AS SSD produced peak sequential reads of 5,495MB/s, which are great, and writes of 3,805MB/s, limited by the number of channels used in the 500GB model Samsung sent for review.

Samsung has recently released the 2TB version of this drive, which at $430 represents better value for money ($0.22/GB), and while the writes are notably better, they still lag behind the SN850 and Rocket 4 Plus. It would seem that for this generation, Samsung is content to pass the banner to Western Digital for the best SSD money can buy.

Read the full Samsung 980 Pro 500GB review.

Silicon Power isn't as big a name for consumers as some of the storage behemoths here, but with pricing as good as this, it's not a brand you should ignore. Silicon Power basically took the same components as every other first-generation PCIe 4.0 manufacturer and bundled them cheaper than anyone else. Compare the specs of this drive to those of the first-gen Sabrent Rocket, and you'd be forgiven for thinking we'd copied and pasted them. They're essentially the same drives, apart from the price. This 2TB is $30 cheaper. 

You do get slightly less for your money—there's no drive migration software to be found here, and where Sabrent has a thin copper heatsink on its drive, the US70 has a sticker. Still, there was no evidence of heat being an issue, and if you're buying a new SSD, then reinstalling Windows 10 afresh isn't a bad idea.

Performance is healthy too, and indistinguishable from other drives using the same core of the Phison E16 controller and Toshiba 96-layer TLC NAND. You're looking at sequential read and write speeds of 4,172MB/s and 3,794MB/s in AS SSD, which are both healthy for incompressible data, and well above what you'll see from even the latest PCIe 3.0 drives. Overall, this is a big, fast drive for really not much cash.

Read the full Silicon Power US70 2TB review.

Sabrent has plenty of quality drives in its arsenal, but the Rocket 4 2TB stands out for offering a great all-around package at a reasonable price. Now we're beset with second-generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs. It's lost some of its shine, but only in the sense that it's no longer up there with the best drives around when it comes to peak synthetic throughput. In practical terms, this is still a great offering, and if your budget doesn't quite stretch to the newest drives, this is worth picking up.

Powered by the powerful combo of the Phison E16 controller and Toshiba 96-layer TLC NAND flash, this is the drive that really put Sabrent on the map for us and showed that having the right components is key to a quality SSD. The fact that you get a copy of Acronis TrueImage means that migrating to the new drive is a breeze, while the Sabrent Toolbox makes checking your SSD straightforward.

Performance is impressive, thanks to a healthy amount of overprovisioning, SLC cache, and DRAM. In testing, it managed peak sequential read and writes in AS SSD (using incompressible data) of 4,205MB/s and 3,749MB/s, which is decent for a first-gen drive. As with Sabrent's other offerings, you can also pick this up with a heatsink bundled for an extra $20—useful if your motherboard doesn't come with a heatsink for the M.2 slots.

Read the full Sabrent Rocket 4 2TB review.

Back when PCIe 4 storage was in its infancy, AMD shipped out the review kits for its first Zen 2 processors with one of these impossibly speedy drives in tow to show off what the new interface was capable of. At the time, there were lots of fast PCIe 3.0 drives doing the rounds, but nothing could touch the sequential throughput on offer here. The Force MP600 range has stood the test of time well, too, thanks to some keen pricing along the way.

Performance-wise you're looking at peak sequential reads and writes ever so slightly behind more recent first-gen offerings, but really only just. So while reading and writing compressible data is a tad slower, when it comes to incompressible data, the reads of 4,196MB/s and writes of 3,773MB/s are pretty much indistinguishable from the Sabrent and Silicon Power offerings. 

One thing in the MP600's favor is that it ships with its own heatsink as standard. This helps keep operating temperatures down and ensures that the drive doesn't throttle when pushed—particularly useful if your motherboard doesn't have M.2 heatsinks as standard. It is a tad more expensive than the other drives here, but you do get that cooler. Overall, this is still a quality drive.

Best PCIe 4.0 SSD FAQ

For Intel-based systems, PCIe 4.0 support is included on 11th Gen Rocket Lake processors and 12th Gen Alder Lake processors. Just make sure to double check your chip and motherboard online to be sure, as there are always exceptions.

That is is theoretically 4GB/s, but it is closer to 3,500MB/s due to various overheads. PCIe 4.0 SSDs do cost more than their PCIe 3.0 counterparts, though, so unless you're planning to upgrade to a supporting platform soon, it's probably worth sticking with a more affordable PCIe 3.0 drive.

When it comes to real-world tests, we time how long it takes to copy a 30GB game install across the drive and use PCMark10 and Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers, which includes a level load test. We also check operating temperatures to ensure that the drive isn't getting too hot and throttling.