It wasn’t all that long ago when I was recommending 1 TB Gen 4 SSDs as being the best balance between speed, capacity, and price. But with game sizes getting ever larger, you’re better off choosing something with 2 TB of storage—I certainly wouldn’t pick anything smaller for an upgrade now.
But which one to choose? The best SSD for gaming is the WD Black SN850X but prices for those have risen quite a lot in recent times. The Lexar NM790 is a great budget option but since it lacks a DRAM cache, it’s not ideal if you’re constantly moving around lots of big files, like I do.
Well, enter stage left, the Silicon Power XS70. It’s furnished with 172-layer Micron NAND flash chips and the well-regarded Phison E18 controller, plus 2 GB of DDR4-RAM. As we discovered in our XS70 review of this exact model, it’s ridiculously fast and the stylish heatsink does a great job of keeping it cool, even when being worked really hard.
The XS70 also meets the full requirements to be used as an SSD expansion in the PlayStation 5 so if you’re looking to add a lot more storage to that console, it’s a great choice for that, too.
For PC gaming, though, there’s little around that’s better and certainly nothing at this price. If you want more performance, you’ll have to go down the Gen 5 (PCIe 5.0) route, but they’re a lot more expensive and run very hot.
If you need more storage than 2 TB, then just go with the 4 TB version of the Silicon Power XS70, which is just $247 on Amazon. That’s double the capacity for less than double the price of the 2 TB model.
The only negative aspect of the Silicon Power XS70 is the support app, which you can use to monitor its status and operational health, as well as test its performance and securely erase it. Looking like something from the Windows XP era, it lacks any kind of cloning and transferring tools, which is something that you do get with more expensive SSDs.
But that’s a very minor quibble and overall, the Silicon Power XS70 is a great SSD upgrade for any gaming PC.
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