We’ve long resisted the idea of recommending PCIe 5.0 SSDs here at PC Gamer, as the early iterations were expensive, ran hot, and didn’t really do much for your gaming experience over a Gen 4 drive for the extra cash. Well, that last one is still debatable, but our buying guide now features two drives far less prone to those early issues—the super-speedy WD Black SN8100, which is still fairly expensive but mega-fast, and the newly-minted Crucial P510, which isn’t.

Oh, the Crucial is far from slow, you understand. When it comes to sequential reads and writes we recorded the P510 at 10,973 MB/s and 9,394 MB/s respectively, which blows any Gen 4 drive out of the water. It’s just not quite up to the pace of its PCIe 5.0 competition.

But given you can find the 2 TB variant for $183 at Amazon right now, it represents a good value proposition for those of you looking to get on the Gen 5 train for less. If you’re in the business of transferring large files on the regular, or you’re a dab hand at video editing, 3D-modelling, or other such SSD-heavy work, this drive provides a significant speed bump over a Gen 4 model for a touch more moolah. With time, I’d expect the price to fall even further, as many SSDs do.

Not only that, but it runs cool, calm, and collected, giving you the best chance of achieving those relatively impressive speeds for sustained periods of time. That makes it the best budget PCIe 5.0 SSD, a remarkable achievement given how expensive many of its competitors can be.

So, how has Crucial managed to pull off this particular trick? By employing the brand-spanking-new and remarkably efficient Phison E31T controller with some in-house sourced Micron 276-Layer TLC NAND, keeping costs low and temperatures even lower.

It’s not the fastest at random 4K workloads, mind, and it can’t quite keep up with some of the speedier competition in our current lineup of tested PCIe 5.0 drives. But given it delivers decent Gen 5 performance with very few of the traditional drawbacks for reasonable money, it has to go in our best SSD buying guide in a slot of its very own.

Mind you, if you’re simply looking for a great PCIe 4.0 drive for less cash, we have plenty of options to choose from in our other picks, along with that aforementioned WD Black SN8100 to gawk at. Check out our current recommendations below to see the very best SSDs money can buy in 2025.

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The best SSD drives for gaming