Prime Big Deal Days Gaming SSD Deals, Measured

The top of the range: 8TB

The highest tier in stock today is 8TB (7 listings), cheapest at $193.75/TB. The tier below, 4TB, is cheapest at $127.50/TB.

On this arithmetic the cheaper tier is the better buy: per TB, 8TB costs 52% more than 4TB today ($193.75/TB against $127.50/TB). The 8TB tier suits a library that no longer fits the tier below, in a board with few M.2 slots - not a buyer chasing the lowest price per TB.

The same-money trade (computed live)

Capacity-matched at 2TB: the cheapest Gen5 drive costs $0.149/GB against $0.110/GB for the cheapest Gen4 - a 35% premium per gigabyte today.

Budget divided by each generation's cheapest in-stock price per gigabyte, at whatever capacity that drive is - a price fact about today's listings, not a claim about what either generation does. The capacity-matched figure above is the like-for-like one.

Published game-load tests - PRESS tier, not ours

• The Verge, 8 August 2023 (Tom Warren): 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. source
• PCWorld, 8 March 2024 (Dominic Bayley): "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. source
• Tom's Hardware, 1 February 2023 (Anton Shilov): "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. source
• Tom's Hardware, 8 August 2026 (Dan Mateescu): From the article's verdict: "Across all other titles, PCIe SSDs provided no meaningful performance advantage, and there were no observable differences between PCIe generations." Only Forspoken and Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart showed measurable SATA-versus-PCIe differences, and neither separated PCIe generations. source

Thermals and lane sharing - maker and press facts

• Tom's Hardware (PRESS), 11 May 2023: "Crucial's PCIe 5.0 SSD Throttles to HDD Speeds Without Cooler." Recorded average write performance after 15 minutes on the bare (uncooled) drive: 1,027 MB/s, down from 3,681 MB/s on the same drive with its heatsink fitted - dipping as low as roughly 100 MB/s at points during the test. source
• Sabrent (manufacturer blog) (MAKER), 12 July 2023: "This is why Gen5 SSDs require a heatsink for proper operation, at least for the time being... Gen5 drives are designed to use their own heatsink, high-end third-party heatsinks, or motherboard M.2 heatsinks." source
• ASUS (official support documentation) (MAKER), Last updated 6 May 2026: "Check the user manual of the motherboard to confirm whether the PCIE expansion slot you installed shares the bandwidth with the M.2 storage device... When M.2_3 or M.2_4 is connected to an M.2 SSD, PCIEX16(G5) only operates at x8." source

What to watch in gaming SSDs this event

The flagship gaming SSD is the product event marketing most wants to sell, and Gen5 drives are where the biggest list-price discounts appear. We publish no speed figures of our own and make no performance claim either way. What we can put on the page is the price side, computed live, beside what named publications measured and published, each with its date.

The Gen5 premium above is capacity-matched: the cheapest Gen5 drive against the cheapest Gen4 drive at the same capacity, both in stock today. Comparing a Gen5 drive at one size with a Gen4 drive at another would measure the capacity mix, not the generation.

The same-money trade turns that premium into the question a buyer actually faces: at a fixed budget, how much Gen4 capacity versus how much Gen5 capacity it buys today. It is arithmetic on our own prices - a price fact, stated as one.

The 8TB tier is priced in the premium section below. It exists in both generations at the time of writing and costs far more per drive than 4TB; the per-GB comparison against the tier below is computed there.

What the published game-load tests found

Every figure in this section is someone else's measurement, cited with its publication and date under the press tier; none of it is ours. The Verge measured game load times across a Gen4 Samsung 980 Pro and two Gen5 drives and found them practically identical in several titles - its Counter-Strike and Cyberpunk 2077 figures are within about a second. PCWorld built its argument against buying Gen5 for gaming on that same Verge data, and says so.

Tom's Hardware reported a Forspoken DirectStorage benchmark run in which the step from Gen3 to Gen4 mattered more than the step from Gen4 to Gen5. And in August 2026 Tom's Hardware tested eleven games from SATA to PCIe 5.0 and concluded that, outside two titles, there were no observable differences between PCIe generations.

Gen5 drives also run hotter. The thermal and lane-sharing facts below are the maker's and the press's words: several Gen5 drives need a heatsink to avoid throttling, and on some motherboards populating an M.2 slot disables other lanes or ports. Check your board's manual before buying for a specific slot.

The trap: a Gen5 discount on a drive the game cannot use

The event trap is a flagship Gen5 drive at a headline discount, bought for a game-load gain the published tests did not find. The discount can be real and the drive can still cost far more per gigabyte than a Gen4 drive of the same capacity.

Decide the capacity first. Then compare generations at that capacity using the same-money trade, and read the badge for the specific drive.

Frequently asked questions