Best NVMe SSDs of 2026

Samsung's 9100 PRO is the only drive here that reads at 14,700 MB/s, and the number comes with a condition: you need a PCIe 5.0 slot to see it. On a Gen4 board it behaves like an extremely good Gen4 drive, which is still more than most work asks for. We think it justifies itself for a specific buyer — someone whose day is measured in hundreds of gigabytes moved, not in apps opened.

The hardware behind it explains part of the price. A 5nm controller that Samsung rates as up to 49% more power-efficient than the 990 PRO, random reads up to 1,850K IOPS and writes to 2,600K IOPS, hardware encryption, and Magician software for firmware and drive health. Its 13,400 MB/s write rating is unusually close to the read figure, which is where a lot of drives quietly give ground.

Heat needs planning rather than worrying. This is a drive that wants the motherboard's M.2 shield, and Samsung's own listing notes that PS5 use needs an added heatsink. Give it airflow and it stays in its stride; bury it under a graphics card in a bare slot and a long write will warm it up.

The line also runs to 8TB, which is the quiet second argument. If the goal is one stick that holds everything and you never think about storage again, this is the only family here that gets you there.

Four terabytes at 7,450 MB/s is a particular kind of luxury: you stop managing space. A full game library, a year of camera files, and a scratch disk for edits all live on one stick, and none of them load slowly.

The 990 PRO is the drive that finished Gen4. Random performance is up more than 55% over the 980 PRO, power efficiency up to 50% better, and the 7,450/6,900 MB/s sequential figures sit close enough to the ceiling that the Gen5 premium is hard to argue for on speed alone. For games specifically, it is the most consistently praised drive in this guide.

Where we hesitate is the long view. This is a very high-volume drive, and it has the least reassuring reliability picture in this set. When these drives fail, they tend to fail suddenly, with the board simply not seeing the drive one morning. That can happen to any SSD, but it happens here often enough to plan around: back up anything you cannot re-download, and the capacity argument still wins.

A 7,400 MB/s read rating for a good deal less than the premium drives ask is the whole case for the Predator GM7, and we think it is a strong one. It sits within 50 MB/s of the fastest Gen4 drive in this guide, and nothing about using it feels like a compromise.

It gets there without DRAM, leaning on Host Memory Buffer and an SLC cache instead. That is the design detail worth understanding: once a long write outruns the cache, throughput can drop, which matters if you plan to use it as a video scratch disk. For a Windows install, a game library, and everyday files, you will not come near that edge.

The rest is quietly competent. A single M.2 2280 stick with a five-year warranty, thermal throttling to keep itself in check under load, and Biwin's management software for firmware and health. The listing names the PS5 among compatible devices, and installing it is about as simple as an M.2 drive gets. Pair it with a big secondary drive for archive files and it carries a whole build.

Per terabyte, nothing else here comes close. The SN5000 in 4TB is the lowest cost per gigabyte in this guide, and it manages that without falling back to a SATA-grade interface — 5,500 MB/s read is still well past anything a Gen3 slot can deliver.

The trade sits at the top end. At 5,500/5,000 MB/s it is the slowest Gen4 spec in this set by a clear margin, and moving from a fast boot drive to this one for a single big transfer is noticeable. Loading a level or opening a photo catalog is not, which is why the trade is easy to live with in the role it is built for.

Endurance is where the Blue earns its keep: up to 1,200 TBW on the 4TB model, the kind of rating you want on a drive that will sit there collecting footage for years. There is five-year coverage, nCache 4.0 for write handling, and a free Acronis True Image download for cloning.

So we treat it as a second drive. As a Steam library, a media archive, or a dumping ground inside a desktop, the math is unbeatable. As your only drive, the slower spec and the warmth it puts out during a long write — enough that the motherboard's heatsink is worth fitting — make it a compromise you do not need to make.

The box is the pitch. SIX ships the X7400 with a heatsink and a screwdriver kit, which is more hardware than most drives here come with and exactly what a console install asks for.

At this price we expected corners, and there are not many. It reads at up to 7,350 MB/s, within a rounding error of the fastest Gen4 drives in this guide, and installing it is about as simple as an M.2 drive gets. For a first build or a console expansion, having the two fiddly bits included removes the usual reason a Saturday upgrade turns into a second trip to the store.

The heatsink is functional rather than fancy, which is all a console bay needs. Capacity is where it stops: 1TB holds a handful of large games comfortably and a dozen only if you are disciplined, so this is a games-and-Windows drive rather than an archive. SIX also advertises the read figure and little else, so treat 7,350 MB/s as the headline rather than the whole picture.

Not every upgrade is a new build. The P320 is for the laptop or desktop still running a hard drive or a small SATA SSD, with a Gen3 M.2 slot sitting empty — a five-year-old machine you would rather not replace.

It is a Gen3 x4 drive rated at 3,000 MB/s read and 2,200 MB/s write. That is a fraction of what the Gen4 picks here do, and still an order of magnitude better than the spinning disk it is most likely replacing. Booting Windows, opening a browser, waking from sleep: all dramatically better. Large file work: not.

We recommend it narrowly and happily. For a hand-me-down machine or a second PC that only needs to feel modern, 512GB is a sensible spend, and it installs without drama on the sort of hardware it is aimed at. Just do not put it in a machine with a Gen4 slot, where you would be paying for a drive the board can outrun.