The Crucial T500 is our current recommendation for the ‘best high-end PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD for gaming’, a title it earns through exceptional performance and a more reasonable price than competitors like the Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850x – no mean feat!
Right now there’s a great deal on the 2TB version of the T500 at Amazon UK, where you can get this size for just £130 when you use a £10 voucher. This price also includes one month’s worth of access to all Adobe Creative Cloud apps, like Photoshop, Lightroom and Premiere Pro (worth £34).
James’ write-up of the T500 is well worth reading, so let me reproduce an excerpt here:
In most of our benchmarks, this was even faster than the WD Black SN850X… It also completed the game file copying test in 0.34s, a new record that easily beats the 0.86s of the SN850X and the 0.97s of the Samsung 990 Pro… Speaking of Samsung’s prestige SSD, the T500 also managed to match its Shadow of the Tomb Raider loading time of 6.6s, the only drive I’ve tested – including the PCIe 5.0-based Crucial T700 – to do so. Since the T500 also posts consistently higher read speeds than the 990 Pro, in practical terms you can consider it the new fastest gaming SSD around.
With results like these, who am I to argue? And with the SN850x 2TB at £146 right now, the Crucial T500 is actually the better value option too! You can even use this drive in the PS5, though I’d recommend picking up a cheap NVMe heatsink to match Sony’s recommendations. All in all, highly recommended.
