Breaking PC Gamer Hardware Awards: The Best SSD Of 2025

I see three SSD queens before me—but which one will take the crown home?

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.

Crucial P510Even 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 SSDExternal 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 beca

Source: PC Gamer