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Get a 6600MB/s Crucial P5 Plus SSD for £81, nearly £20 cheaper than it was last weekA historic low price for a blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
A historic low price for a blazing-fast PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD.
Get a Crucial P5 Plus 1TB SSD for £80.69 (RRP £152)
So who is this drive for? I’d suggest almost anyone that doesn’t already have a PCIe 4.0 drive but does have a motherboard that will support it*. This gives you access to higher transfer speeds, which is handy for moving large files like video files around, and more importantly ought to give you full access tothe advantages of DirectStorage- assuming that actually appears in a shipping game before the sun slowly fades away and all life on Earth vanishes. The idea there is to give the GPU direct access to files on your SSD, cutting the CPU out of the process to eliminate a bottleneck, speeding up load times and freeing up the CPU to do other tasks at the same time. Both PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 drives are supported, but it’s fair to assume that having better sequential and random speeds will make the effect more powerful on PCIe 4.0.
*PCIe 4.0 debuted with Intel and AMD’s 500-series chipsets (eg AMD B550 and X570, Intel B560 and Z590), so anything made in the last few yearsshouldbe tickety-boo. It’s a bit more complicated than this - your CPU also needs to support PCIe 4.0 and some Intel Z490 motherboards also support PCIe 4.0 with a BIOS update, but this should give you the broad strokes.
So: an exceptionally good value ‘second-generation’ PCIe 4.0 SSD that falls behind the WD SN850 and the Samsung 980 Pro in some metrics, but still works well in my humble estimation. For £100, it’s arguably better to go for one of these other drives, but at £80 we’re only twenty quid more thanSATAdrives - so what’s not to like?
