Are SSDs are essential for today's gaming PCs?
The Intel Optane 905P is the Titan of SSDs: incredibly fast, enormously expensive and basically the best SSD on the market, and a piece of PC hardware we just had to test out. It's our contention that a good SSD is essential at this point for your gaming PC - just in terms of the extra user-friendliness you get from Windows, plus the reduced loading times in games - but just how much do you need to invest to get a decent experience? How do mid-range and more value-orientated SSDs compare to the absolute state of the art? And where does this leave the traditional mechanical hard drive? Technology has continued to evolve there so in assessing solid-state performance for gaming, we decided to include a fast modern drive too.
To get a good overall view of the market and the kind of capabilities that solid state storage delivers across a range of price-points, we used five drives for our tests overall. The Optane 905P is staggeringly expensive at around $600 or £550 and its performance is indeed unparalleled, but we've also covered a range of more cost-effective alternatives. The Western Digital Black 500GB SSD uses the PCI Express-based NVMe standard and is about one third of the price of the 905P. Cheaper still are SATA-based drives like Crucial's well-received MX500 at around $90/£90. Up against that we have a 1TB Western Digital Blue SSD. Again, that's SATA in nature but its extra capacity commands a £150/$160 price-point. Finally, representing the classic mechanical HDD, WD supplied us with the Black 6TB, priced at around £240/$240.
So, why is the 905P so expensive? Well, it's a different kind of product, more intended more for workstations or deep-pocketed enthusiasts than the average gamer. The drive's 480GB of 3D XPoint memory, developed jointly by Micron and Intel, theoretically provides a comprehensive advantage in terms of latency and endurance. For the purposes of our testing here it represents the current state-of-the-art, the standard by which all of our other test drives should be judged.
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