This $200 enterprise-grade 960GB M.2 SSD costs less than even SATA drives
If it's good enough for servers, it's good enough for your gaming rig.
There are plenty of SSD options at every price tier—from basic $36 SATA drives to high-end NVMe M.2 cards with blistering-fast speeds. The latter tends to be fairly expensive, but Newegg currently has a 960GB Samsung model for just $199.99. That's over $100 less than the next cheapest 1TB NVMe drive, and it's cheaper than all the 1TB SATA SSDs at Newegg.
The Samsung MZ1LV960HCJH, aka PM953, is an OEM drive aimed at use in servers. It features up to 1GB/s sequential read speeds, and up to 820MB/s sequential writes (both 128KB). Random write performance (19k IOPS) is a little slower than the average SATA drive, but it's still plenty fast for everyday use. The drive also features "Enterprise-grade power loss protection," so you're less likely to lose data in the event of an unexpected shutdown.
You can buy the SSD from Newegg here. It uses the longer M.2 22110 form factor, so you might want to double-check that it will fit in your PC before buying.
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Corbin is a tech journalist, software developer, and longtime PC Gamer freelance writer, currently based in North Carolina. He now focuses on the world of Android as a full-time writer at XDA-Developers. He plays a lot of Planet Coaster and Fallout and hosts a podcast all about forgotten stories from tech history.