At long last, PCIe 5.0 SSDs are finally worth buying
Ask most PC enthusiasts about the most powerful or fastest CPU and graphics card you can buy, and they'll probably think of AMD's Ryzen 9 9950X3D or Nvidia's GeForce RTX 5090. But if you ask them again about SSDs, you'll get far more varied replies, and I'd bet money on few of them being a PCIe 5.0 (aka Gen 5) solid state drive.
That's because the first generation of PCIe 5.0 drives just weren't good enough to be recommended. Sure, their outright performance in sequential burst read/writes was far higher than any previous generation of SSD, but everything else just wasn't up to scratch.
They typically ran far too hot, offered merely adequate random 4K performance, and actually did little to boost the loading speed of the operating system and games. Oh, and they were horribly expensive.
Well, you can wave goodbye to all of that, thanks to the likes of SanDisk's WD Black SN8100. It's the fastest SSD we've ever tested—not just for sequential stuff but random read/writes, too. It runs warmer than your average Gen 4 drive, of course, and it's more expensive, but compared to PCIe 5.0 drives of the past two years, it's the technological leap forward we've been waiting for.
That means we're now happy to recommend a Gen 5 SSD to anyone looking to have the ultimate in storage performance, and in our new best PCIe 5.0 SSD for gaming guide, we also highly rate the Crucial P510 for its wallet-friendly price tag and the Corsair MP700 Elite for being the coolest Gen 5 drive yet.
As someone with a small mountain of WD Black SN850X SSDs (four in one rig and two more in two other PCs), I've been waiting for its Gen 5 update for a good while now. When it's time to upgrade, I know exactly what solid state drives I'll be loading up with again.
The quick list
The best PCIe 5.0 SSDs for gaming
Best overall
Best overall PCIe 5.0 SSD
The WD Black SN8100 is everything you could want from a PCIe 5.0 SSD. Its peak speed is blistering, and so is its sustained performance, and it runs pretty cool. Only the high price tag for the 4 TB model dulls its glory.
Best budget
Best budget PCIe 5.0 SSD
PCIe 5.0 SSDs are normally a lot more expensive than PCIe 4.0 models, but not the Crucial P510. You do sacrifice a bit of performance to have a more wallet-friendly price tag, but it's plenty fast enough for gaming.
Best cooled
Best cooled PCIe 5.0 SSD
Most Gen 5 SSDs run quite a bit hotter than Gen 4 models. Apart from the Corsair MP700 Elite, that is. Thanks to its hefty heatsink and clever chip design, it'll be cooler than anything else in your gaming PC.