Check out more of the year's best tech in our PC Gamer Hardware Awards 2025 coverage.
Okay, you got me: It does feel kind of weird to be celebrating our SSD hardware award nominees right as we stare down 2026, and the surging memory prices that will no doubt have an expensive, knock-on effect over storage. But 2025 isn't over just yet so, while I've got the breathing room, I'm gonna fill my lungs and shout about the SSDs that impressed us the most this year.
Unlike last year, no teeny-tiny 2230 form factor drives get a look in this year. Obviously, handheld gaming PCs are no less popular, but internal NVMe SSDs have simply had a stronger showing this year.
However, that doesn't mean this is anything like a one horse race—even our best SSD for gaming has a veritable stable full of anime horse girls. Confusing metaphors? Me? Never. Anyway, keeping things interesting, it's not just one brand dominating the nominee top spots.
In fact, each of our nominees differ in terms of capacity and even form factor—we've even got an external SSD this year in the form of the exceptional Sandisk Extreme Pro. Obviously the thing all of our nominees share is that they'd all make for an excellent, speedy game drive for your rig—though the WD Black SN8100 NVMe SSD is easily the fastest by a significant margin. Better yet, some of them are even still reasonably priced to boot; you can pick up the Crucial P510 NVMe SSD for comfortably less than $150! So, without further ado, take a gander at our three best SSD nominees below.
Best gaming SSD 2025: the nominees
So, that's our three SSD nominees this year, but which drive will race into first place? Stay tuned, because all of our hardware award winners will be announced on New Year's Eve. Got it memorised?
