Solid State Drives
Gamers need a computer drive that accesses data quickly, which makes SSDs optimal for the best gaming experience. Video games contain enormous amounts of assets, such as high-resolution textures, models, audio, and more—up to 100 GB of data, in some cases. A game that that takes two to three minutes to load on an HDD takes well under a minute on an SSD. And the initial load is not the only time a game needs to access stored data. Data is needed whenever the player enters a new level, scene, or mission. Long load times can disrupt the game and fast load times protect the sense of immersion that you want when in the middle of your game.
The Crucial P1 is the cheapest 1TB NVMe you can squeeze into your PC, but that low cost comes at… a cost. Crucial has managed to get the price so low because it’s using quad-level cell memory, arguably the worst NAND available to SSDs. It allows for greater density at a lower price, but the trade-off is the overall performance and endurance.
In 2019, Gigabyte Technology demonstrated an 8 TB 16-lane PCIe 4.0 SSD with 15.0 GB/s sequential read and 15.2 GB/s sequential write speeds at Computex 2019. Also in 2019, NVMe M.2 SSDs using the PCIe 4.0 interface were launched. These SSDs have read speeds of up to 5.0 GB/s and write speeds of up to 4.4 GB/s. Due to their high speed operation, these SSDs use large heatsinks, and if they do not receive sufficient cooling airflow will typically thermally throttle down after roughly 15 minutes of continuous operation at full speed.
That’s because it uses the latest PCIe 4.0 interface, which has double the theoretical bandwidth limit of the other PCIe 3.0 drives. And that all means WD can be very aggressive on how much it charges people for the privilege of having a speedy PCIe gtx 1080 8gb in their gaming PC. We’ve no concerns around reliability either, despite the relatively unknown name, having used both the 512GB and 1TB variants regularly as part of our test rigs without fault.
They are increasingly moving, though, to the M.2 form factor discussed above, and these drives come in 42mm, 60mm, 80mm, and 120mm lengths. Since hard drives use older, more established technology, they will likely remain less expensive for the foreseeable future. Though the per-gig price gap is closing between hard drives and low-end gtx 1090s, those extra bucks for the SSD may push your system price over budget. The traditional spinning hard drive is the basic non-volatile storage on a computer. That is, information on it doesn’t “go away” when you turn off the system, unlike data stored in RAM.