Storage has undergone a healthy transformation over the past 12 months. The fastest storage is no longer just for the very wealthy, and in fact, overall prices are much better for gamers than they were earlier this year: you can get a 1TB SSD without selling your PC. and we see no reason not to have this super-fast drive in your gaming machine.

The PCIe 4.0 storage space is also experiencing a major shakeup, with manufacturers like Addlink and Sabrent offering well-crafted drives at low prices and serious performance. With these next-generation drives on current AMD CPUs (and Intel's upcoming chips), they can reach 5GB/s, which is a huge help to those who work with large amounts of files. 2021 will see the introduction of Microsoft's DirectStorage, and in the future gaming While we expect these drives to reach their full potential, they are not bad for gaming as well. [Sabrent, in particular, has released a 4TB drive using QLC NAND, which doesn't seem to have the usual performance pitfalls. [Many of these next-generation drives are built around the Phison E16 controller, which has a number of smart caching technologies to keep things running smoothly. Its successor, the Phison E18, is also on the way, and leaks about its performance have been circulating for some time, promising impressive speed gains.

These benchmark numbers were leaked in part to counter the next-generation drive available for purchase right now, which is the Samsung 980 Pro launched in September. That is the Samsung 980 Pro, which was released in September. The drive is impressive and is featured below, along with more affordable options that make NVMe SSDs accessible to everyone.

This is basically a great year for storage, and these three drives highlight why:

On New Year's Eve, we will announce which of these fast drives will win this year's SSD award. They don't necessarily have to be the fastest or the most affordable, but they are the ones that we believe have moved SSD storage forward the most. While this is certainly a tough category this year, this is always a good sign that the industry is moving forward at the right pace.