Making sure you have the best SSD for gaming you can afford in your PC will seriously improve your experience when using your rig, and give your system a speed boost when it’s loading the latest PC games. A solid-state drive (SSD) uses flash memory to read and write data digitally, and upgrading to one of the best gaming SSD options from an old mechanical hard drive will make an enormous difference to your PC’s responsiveness, while also booting Windows loads quicker.

There are plenty of excellent gaming SSDs on the market, from well-known brands such as Samsung and Crucial, as well as Corsair and Western Digital, as well as more niche options that still perform well. To help you choose the best SSD for gaming, we’ve benchmarked the latest solid-state drives, comparing their read and write speeds against the manufacturers’ claimed specs, while also gauging their real-life performance in games and other applications.

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