Capacity is the tier that matters for gaming, not PCIe generation - published testing (cited below) consistently finds Gen5 indistinguishable from Gen4 in actual game load times. Cheapest Gen4 in stock right now: $0.110/GB (Corsair 2TB). We track what drives cost; here is who tested them and what they found.
Updated ยท measurements cited from publications dated 2023-2024, checked 16 September 2026
We do not test drives. Every performance figure on this page and the pages beneath it is a published measurement from a named publication, cited with the publication, the exact figure, the test context and the date - never our own benchmark, never a claim in our voice about what any drive will feel like. Manufacturer specifications (sequential MB/s, IOPS, TBW, wattage) are labelled as maker claims wherever they appear, not repeated as fact. What is genuinely ours is the price arithmetic: $/GB, the same-money capacity trade below, and the live picks table.
Arranged by generation gap - the pattern across every cited source below is the same shape: the step from Gen3 to Gen4 is where the real difference lives, and the step from Gen4 to Gen5 mostly is not.
Game load times (seconds): CS:GO - 35.46s on a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro (Gen4) vs 35.02s on a 2TB Crucial T700 (Gen5), a 0.44-second gap. Cyberpunk 2077 - 35.00s on the 980 Pro vs 33.94s on a 2TB Seagate FireCuda 540 (Gen5), a 1.06-second gap. Gears 5 showed the largest gap (56.89s vs 52.67-52.9s); Returnal and CS:GO were within a second either way.
Test rig: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D, MSI MEG X670E ACE, 32GB DDR5-6000. Five games tested (Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Cyberpunk 2077, Gears 5, Returnal, CS:GO) across a Gen4 Samsung 980 Pro and two Gen5 drives (Crucial T700, Seagate FireCuda 540). The Verge's own conclusion: "I saw this play out clearly in game loading times, where it was difficult to spot an improvement with the Gen 5 drives... in games like Returnal, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, and Cyberpunk 2077, the results were practically identical."
Read the source โ"Why PC gamers shouldn't waste money on a PCIe 5.0 SSD" - citing The Verge's own game-load testing (see above) as its evidence for gaming, while noting Gen5's real advantage sits in sequential-throughput-bound tasks, not game loading.
PCWorld's own framing piece, built on The Verge's independently-conducted game-load data (PCWorld credits it directly: "a test carried out by our friends over at The Verge") rather than PCWorld's own bench.
Read the source โ"It looks like the difference between PCIe Gen3 and PCIe Gen5 drives may not be that significant with DirectStorage, according to load times from a built-in Forspoken benchmark." The full Gen3-to-Gen5 gap across the benchmark totalled roughly three seconds; Gen4-vs-Gen5 specifically showed no meaningful difference.
Reporting on a Forspoken (a game with a built-in DirectStorage benchmark) test by YouTube channel Compusemble, comparing a PCIe Gen3 Adata XPG SX8200 Pro against a Gen5 Phison E26-based reference SSD. Corroborated independently the same week by Guru3d, HotHardware and NotebookCheck, all describing the same underlying benchmark and reaching the same conclusion: the Gen3-to-Gen4 step matters far more than Gen4-to-Gen5 for this specific DirectStorage title.
Read the source โRead across those three sources: The Verge's own five-game test found Gen5 gaps of 0.44 to 1.06 seconds against a Gen4 drive, several titles showing no measurable difference at all. Tom's Hardware's reporting on a Forspoken DirectStorage benchmark - the title built specifically to exercise fast storage - found the full Gen3-to-Gen5 gap totalled roughly three seconds, with Gen4 and Gen5 essentially tied. That is the arithmetic of their own published numbers, not an inference of ours: the generation that actually moves the needle over these sources' own data is Gen3 to Gen4, not Gen4 to Gen5.
This is the section only a price-tracking site can write: at today's live cheapest $/GB per generation, what does a fixed budget actually buy as capacity? No performance claim here - this is arithmetic on our own price data.
| Budget | Gen4 buys | Gen5 buys | Gen4 $/GB | Gen5 $/GB |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $100 | ~909GB | ~571GB | $0.110 | $0.175 |
| $150 | ~1.4TB | ~857GB | $0.110 | $0.175 |
| $200 | ~1.8TB | ~1.1TB | $0.110 | $0.175 |
| $300 | ~2.7TB | ~1.7TB | $0.110 | $0.175 |
Computed live from the cheapest currently in-stock Gen4 and Gen5 $/GB across our tracked catalogue. Capacity figures are the budget divided by that live rate, rounded down to the nearest listed size band - a price fact, not a performance claim.
These prices sit inside the 2026 NAND shortage, not apart from it. See our SSD price forecast for the supply-side citations and the directional outlook, and what the shortage specifically did to gaming SSD prices for the matched-model analysis on this exact catalogue.
Sorted by $/GB, cheapest first. Cache architecture and Gen4/Gen5 status shown; no speed column, on purpose - see the doctrine note above.
Cache architecture per model line: see our DRAM-vs-DRAM-less explainer for what the distinction means and why it matters more at lower capacities.
A drive's cache architecture - whether it carries a dedicated DRAM chip or relies on Host Memory Buffer (borrowing a slice of your system RAM instead) or dynamic SLC caching - affects sustained write behavior differently from the generation question this hub is built around. It is a separate spec, not a proxy for PCIe generation: both Gen4 and Gen5 drives ship with and without dedicated DRAM depending on the model line. See our DRAM-vs-DRAM-less explainer for what the distinction actually changes and why it matters more at lower capacities, where a DRAM-less design has less of a gap to make up with caching tricks.
Every sequential MB/s, IOPS and TBW figure a listing advertises is the manufacturer's own stated spec, tested under the manufacturer's own conditions - not a figure this site has verified independently, and not comparable across brands without knowing each one's exact test methodology. We label these maker claims wherever they appear on this cluster's pages rather than presenting them as settled fact, for the same reason we cite named publications for performance rather than asserting a ranking ourselves: a spec sheet number and a real game-load measurement answer different questions, and conflating them is exactly how buyers end up paying a premium for a number that never shows up in their actual use.
This is also why the live table below has no speed column. Every other field in it - capacity, generation, cache architecture, price, $/GB - is something we can state plainly from our own catalogue data or the manufacturer's own datasheet. A speed figure would need to be either a maker claim dressed up as a ranking criterion, or a benchmark we did not run. We'd rather leave the column out than fill it with either.
This cluster covers PC gaming SSDs - M.2 NVMe drives for a desktop or laptop build. For the PlayStation 5's own expansion-slot requirements, licensing and picks, see our PS5 SSD hub, built around Sony's own published M.2 requirement. The two clusters answer different questions - a drive that is a great value PC gaming SSD is not automatically PS5-compatible, and vice versa.
The published testing we cite is consistent: The Verge's own game-load measurements found Gen5 "practically identical" to Gen4 in most titles tested, with gaps under a second even in the largest case. PCWorld built an entire piece on that same data titled "why PC gamers shouldn't waste money on a PCIe 5.0 SSD." Gen5's documented advantage sits in sustained sequential throughput - large asset libraries, big file transfers - not game-load time.
Per The Verge's own tested figures: 0.44 seconds on Counter-Strike, 1.06 seconds on Cyberpunk 2077, with several titles showing no measurable difference at all. See the measurements section below for the full cited breakdown, including a DirectStorage-specific test.
Published testing says yes for sustained loads. Tom's Hardware measured a Gen5 drive throttling to roughly a third of its heatsinked write speed without one, and PCWorld reported independent testing finding uncooled Gen5 drives generating file-system errors or shutting down. See our thermals page for the full cited picture and the live fitted-vs-bare price comparison.
On many current motherboards, yes, if the Gen5 M.2 slot is CPU-attached. ASUS's own documentation states that populating certain M.2 slots drops the primary PCIe 5.0 x16 graphics slot to x8. Your board's own manual is the final authority - see our Gen4-vs-Gen5 page for the citation and how to check your specific board.
No, per the cited testing. Tom's Hardware's reporting on a Forspoken DirectStorage benchmark found the difference between Gen3 and Gen5 totalled roughly three seconds across the whole benchmark, with Gen4 and Gen5 essentially indistinguishable. See our DirectStorage page for the full picture and what Microsoft's own documentation actually requires.
Capacity is the dimension every cited source agrees actually matters - installs keep growing (several major titles now publish 125-161GB requirements) while the Gen4-to-Gen5 speed difference does not show up in load times. See our capacity guide and the live same-money trade below for what a fixed budget buys at each generation.