Best SSDs of 2020 – Value, Games, High Capacity, and Performance

The best SSDs

Thinking of upgrading from your slow hard drive or old SSD to one of the newer and fastest drives on the market? You have come to the right place for advice. We’ve put together a list of the best recommended NVMe SSDs for your PC to consider in 2020, based on many hours of in-house testing and benchmarking here at TweakTown.

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We cover Best Quality SSD, Best Gaming SSD, Best High Capacity SSD, Best High Performance SSD, and Best SSD overall. These recommendations come directly from our storage editors at TweakTown who spend a lot of time testing new SSDs all the time. We are passionate about SSDs and love to share our experiences with them, with you, our readers. Our editors have tested over 100 SSDs this year alone, which gives us great confidence in our recommendations.

So, without further ado, let’s get this show started and see the recommended readers below. Enjoy!

Quick list of the best SSDs

• Intel 665P 1TB (value)
• SK hynix Gold P31 1TB (games)
• Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB (capacity)
• WD Black SN850 1TB (high performance)
• WD Black SN850 1TB (global)

Best Value SSD

Value recommendation: Intel 665P 1TB (our review)

While Intel 665P 1TB may not support the latest and greatest NVMe PCIe Gen4 standard for ultimate performance on supported motherboards, it offers particularly good value for money when cost per GB is factored in. Prices vary, but at the time of writing, it’s hard to pass around $ 0.12 per GB. For its asking price, we were quite impressed with what it offered in TweakTownSamsung’s user experience rating, surpassing other popular players such as Samsung’s 970 Pro and 970 EVO Plus.

Using QLC 3D NAND flash, the 665P is no slouch and will still offer a huge upgrade if you upgrade from an older hard drive or SSD. When we tested and reviewed the 1TB 665P (review link above), we saw a sequential read speed of 2128MB / s under Crystal Disk Mark. Read the review for more player details. It also includes a very strong five year warranty for your peace of mind.

Best gaming SSD

Game recommendation: SK hynix Gold P31 1TB (our review)

Using TLC NAND flash, the SK hynix Gold P31 1TB is another PCIe 3.0 based drive, like the Intel 665P, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider it just because it’s not supported by PCIe 4.0. The Gold P31 1TB SSD might well have been our recommendation for our value drive as well, but instead we find it more suitable as a gaming drive that won’t cost you a fortune, at around $ 0.14 per GB. It offers a huge performance advantage over the 665P when it comes to our user experience rating, making it a very solid choice for a gaming PC.

A drive that won’t cost you too much and still delivers solid performance. At time of testing, it provided the third fastest game level load time, only improved by more expensive players. When we tested and reviewed the Gold P31 1TB (review link above), we saw a sequential read speed of 3603MB / s under Crystal Disk Mark. Read the review for more player details.

Best High Capacity SSD

High capacity recommendation: Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB (our opinion)

Got some money to spare and want one of the best SSDs on the planet? For our high capacity SSD recommendation, it’s impossible to look beyond Sabrent’s Rocket Q 8 TB drive. When it comes to consumer drives, this is the drive to add to your shopping list if you need a huge amount of fast SSD storage in your machine.

8TB is more than enough to store a very impressive collection of games to make them easy and quick to load, as well as plenty of space for everything else of your operating system, saves, videos, etc. It’s not the cheapest drive, priced at around $ 0.19 per GB, but remember producing an NVMe M.2 drive with so much storage on such a small storage device isn’t not an easy task. It’s not the best performing SSD out there, but it will still provide a huge boost if you’re coming from a hard drive or older SSD.

When we tested and reviewed the Rocket Q 8TB (review link above), we saw a sequential read speed of 3463MB / s under Crystal Disk Mark. Read the review for more player details.

Best high performance SSD

High performance recommendation: WD Black SN850 1TB (our review)

Our pick of the best high performance SSD ended up being a very easy choice, but it’s almost coming to the end of 2020. Western Digital’s Black SN850 1TB is an absolute killer of a reader. Literally. It managed to beat many of our lab test records, knocking other top drives like Samsung’s 980 Pro and Plextor’s MP9 + to the top of the benchmark performance list.

The WD SN850 is a very fast PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe M.2 drive offering sequential read speeds of over 7 Gb / s and write speeds of well over 5 Gb / s. But that’s only part of the story, where it counts in all other areas, the SN850 dominates by delivering an incredibly high standard. TweakTown User experience ranking well above Samsung’s 980 Pro and only behind Intel’s Optane 905P 960GB, which is several times more expensive than the SN850 and a PCIe AIC, which is not considered this guide, which only includes M.2 discs.

Best overall SSD

General recommendation: WD Black SN850 1TB (our review)

This may not be as surprising here, but WD withdraws a second recommendation with the 1TB SN850 SSD. You already know it’s a performance beast, but if you want the best of the best when all factors are factored in (value, play, capacity, and performance), we can’t look past the SN850.

This is the most expensive SSD in this guide, at around $ 0.23 per GB at the time of writing. But it doesn’t matter. For the extra cost you pay per gigabyte, you’ll have peace of mind knowing you’re buying the best SSD of 2020 and the one that will serve you very well for a while.

Note that we were considering a separate category for “Best Operating System (OS) SSD”, but decided to merge it into this category. If we had this category the SN850 would win it too.

Take advantage of our SSD upgrade

Good luck with your SSD upgrade experience! Above is a nice selection of the best SSDs of 2020 so far. If a new reader hits the market and surprises us, we’ll be sure to update this guide with its inclusion.

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