PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The best SSD of 2025
Check out more of the year's best tech in our PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2025 coverage.
Okay, you got me: It does feel kind of weird to be celebrating our SSD hardware award nominees right as we stare down 2026, and the surging memory prices that will no doubt have an expensive, knock-on effect over storage. But 2025 isn't over just yet so, while I've got the breathing room, I'm gonna fill my lungs and shout about the SSDs that impressed us the most this year.
Unlike last year, no teeny-tiny 2230 form factor drives get a look in this year. Obviously, handheld gaming PCs are no less popular, but internal NVMe SSDs have simply had a stronger showing this year.
However, that doesn't mean this is anything like a one horse race—even our best SSD for gaming has a veritable stable full of anime horse girls. Confusing metaphors? Me? Never. Anyway, keeping things interesting, it's not just one brand dominating the nominee top spots.
In fact, each of our nominees differ in terms of capacity and even form factor—we've even got an external SSD this year in the form of the exceptional Sandisk Extreme Pro. Obviously the thing all of our nominees share is that they'd all make for an excellent, speedy game drive for your rig—though the WD Black SN8100 NVMe SSD is easily the fastest by a significant margin. Better yet, some of them are even still reasonably priced to boot; you can pick up the Crucial P510 NVMe SSD for comfortably less than $150! So, without further ado, take a gander at our three best SSD nominees below.
Best gaming SSD 2025: the nominees
Crucial P510
Even amid the memory apocalypse, you can still find affordable PCIe 5.0 SSDs—and here we have the stand out case in point. Rather than paying the price for a middleman manufacturer, Crucial has instead opted for its own in-house Micron 276-layer TLC NAND.
The result is a speedy Gen 5 drive at a much less steep cost. This particular choice of flash memory is denser and, at least on paper, technically faster than some of the competition too. To get to the point, you're getting a read speed of up to 11,000 MB/s, and a write speed of up to 9,000 MB/s. I'd say that means this budget SSD more than deserves the nomination.
Read our full Crucial P510 NVMe SSD review.
Sandisk Extreme Pro external SSD
External drives don't often get a look-in when it comes to hardware awards season, but this SSD has made me think perhaps it's time we stop holding them at arm's length. That's because, so long as you've got a USB4 port to hook this drive up to, you'll enjoy sustained USB4 speeds to the tune of an up to 3,800 MB/s read speed, and an up to 3,700 MB/s write speed.
Sure, that's not as fast as the other nominees, but if you're playing musical chairs with some beefy game files, this external SSD certainly won't leave you waiting around. Besides that, this drive ain't no slouch when it comes to random 4K performance either.
During benchmarking, Jacob wrote in his review that the Sandisk Extreme Pro pretty much "wiped the floor with every other external SSD [he's] tested." But can it also mop up this award? Time will tell.
Read our full Sandisk Extreme Pro 2 TB external SSD review.
WD Black SN8100
Another PCIe 5.0 drive that doesn't cost at least two of my limbs? Is it my birthday? No, that's just how far Gen 5 drives have come. Granted, $250 is still a bit much for a lot of folk, but with performance like this, those with deeper pockets may well find it easy to justify the upgrade.
Why? Because, with a sustained read speed of 14,900 MB/s, and a sustained write speed of 14,000 MB/s, the WD Black SN8100 is eye-watering-ly quick. Not only that, but random 4K performance is far from a let-down either, turning in a 119 MB/s read speed, and a 349 MB/s write speed during Zak's testing.
The fact this thing only briefly brushed up against 74 °C during all of his benchmarking really makes this SSD the complete package. But is it enough to win the prize overall? You won't have to wait long to find out.
Read our full WD Black SN8100 2 TB NVMe SSD review.
So, that's our three SSD nominees this year, but which drive will race into first place? Stay tuned, because all of our hardware award winners will be announced on New Year's Eve. Got it memorised?