The best 1 TB gaming SSD you can buy is now just $79, the cheapest it's been for a good while

I must confess that I'm somewhat biased here. Not [[link]] because I have shares in Western Digital or my uncle works for them, but it's that my main PC rig has four WD Black drives in it. They're all 2 TB versions of the that's on offer here, but I'd still recommend the smaller drive in a flash.

The reasons for this are simple: it's very quick, very reliable, and very easy to cool. Starting with the first point, it uses an NVMe PCIe 4.0 interface and while there are faster SSDs out there, Western Digital has applied 1 GB of DRAM to the drive, even though it has up to 300 MB of pseudo-SLC cache.

This means it can sustain its full write speed for a long time before it drops in performance. So if you like to install lots of big games all the time, then the SN850X will breeze through the task.

As to the second point, my 2 TB SN850Xs have all been hammered with data writes in the past year, but none of them have shown any decrease in reported life span or wear. Cheaper drives that I've used in the past have always notably degraded in the same period of time and workload.

Lastly, even when pushed really hard, the SN850X never breaks a sweat. Sure it can get a little on the toasty side, but certainly nothing like a Gen5 SSD.

So if you're looking to [[link]] add an extra SSD to your gaming rig, maybe to store your Steam library on, then I can't recommend the WD Black SN850X highly enough. There's a good reason why Western Digital hasn't rushed to replace it yet in its storage portfolio—it really is the best gaming SSD you [[link]] can buy.