Best Drives for Gaming

For games you play regularly, an NVMe or SATA SSD dramatically cuts load times (often 2–5× faster than an HDD). But NVMe costs several times more per terabyte. The practical answer for most gamers is a two-drive setup: a 1–2 TB NVMe for active games and the OS, and a 4–8 TB HDD for your full library. Move titles between the two as your playlist changes.

Not for load times alone — most games show only 10–20% faster loads on Gen 4 versus Gen 3 NVMe. Where Gen 4 is required: PS5 internal expansion (the slot physically requires Gen 4) and the handful of DirectStorage-enabled PC titles that benefit from sequential burst speed. For a PC gaming drive, Gen 3 NVMe is still plenty fast and often cheaper.

Modern AAA titles range from 50 to 200+ GB each. A library of 20–30 installed games easily fills 1–2 TB. For bulk game storage, 4 TB is a comfortable starting point; 8 TB lets you keep your entire library installed without managing what to uninstall. Compare $/TB across capacities on the live table — at 4 TB the price per TB on the live table is currently the overall value leader for HDDs.

Yes, for game libraries and archiving. Steam, Epic, and GOG all support external drives as library locations. External drives are slower than internal ones (USB 3.0 tops out around 100–150 MB/s), so move your active games to the internal NVMe for the fastest load times and use the external for the backlog.

For PS5 and Xbox Series X, external USB drives store but cannot run native-generation games — you need to transfer a title to internal storage first. Older backward-compatible titles can run directly from USB external on both consoles. For PS5 native titles, use the internal NVMe expansion slot; for budget game archiving, a portable external HDD works fine.