The fastest gaming SSD for PC and PS5 is 50% off its UK RRP today at Amazon
The WD SN850x 2TB cuts game load times substantially.
I'll cut to the chase - the fastest 2TB gaming SSD money can buy you right now, the Western Digital Black SN850x, is available from Ebuyer on Amazon for £150, which works out to just 7.5p per gigabyte. That's 50 percent off its UK RRP and a great deal for this level of performance for PC/PS5 gaming and content creation.
The WD SN850x is one of the best PS5 SSDs out there, given that its speeds smash Sony's stringent requirements, and of course that means it's one of the best gaming SSDs for PCs too.
The drive's read and write speeds of 7300MB/s and 6300MB/s respectively make this one of the fastest SSDs available at the moment, falling behind only PCIe 5.0 SSDs that haven't yet come to market. Random speeds, a better indicator of real-world performance, are also absurdly high at 1.2M IOPS for reads and 1.1M IOPS for writes. By comparison even the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives top out at around half that. These impressive results are made possible by the fast PCIe 4.0 interface and WD's vertical integration, meaning they make the controller, NAND flash and other components by themselves rather than relying on third parties, allowing each to work together effectively.
For PS5 usage, adding this drive to the existing internal SSD quadruples the console's usable storage, going from around 0.66GB to 2.66GB. (While the PS5's quoted internal capacity is 825GB, only 666GB or so of that is usable.) Given how large many AAA games are these days, having the extra space is a real luxury.
Note that the drive on sale here doesn't come with a heatsink, but you can pick one up inexpensively - eg this example is just £8 and suits PS5 or PC use perfectly. On that note, using it with a PC is possible as long as you've got a PCIe 4.0 capable motherboard - to save you the hassle of looking, anything from the last three to four years should be OK. Installing the drive is easy too, with plenty of YouTube tutorials to follow along with and only requiring the drive to be inserted and a single screw inserted to secure it.
If you want to take your game storage to the next level, this SN850x deal from Amazon is a hard one to miss!