Solid-state drives, especially NVMe drives, have become ubiquitous in newer builds because of their convenient size, blazing fast transfer speeds, and cost.If you're shopping for a drive, you may be tempted to try and "future-proof" your SSD, but you shouldn't.There are better ways to spend your money.
What does future proofing storage mean? When people talk about "future proofing," it almost always centers around the maximum theoretical read and write speeds of a drive.That makes sense, too.After all, if you're going to spend hundreds on a few terabytes of storage, it is normal to want the best of the best.
However, if you're trying to future-proof by buying the fastest possible drive, you're doing yourself a disservice: You should be buying the biggest PCIe 4.0 drives you can afford instead.Storage is useful forever Unlike storage speeds, storage is basically always valuable—a terabyte today is a terabyte tomorrow.As a great example, I still buy spinning platter mechanical hard drives for my desktop PC and my server because they are a much better bargain when you're only considering dollars per gigabyte.
That deal only gets better if you're willing to buy those drives recertified or refurbished.Related Forget 4TB SSDs: You can get a 24TB hard drive for half the price You don't need an SSD for everything—you should buy a used hard drive instead Posts 8 By Nick Lewis The same thing applies to PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 4.0 SSDs, too.Those older drives might be slower than a PCIe 5.0 drive, but they're also normally around 30% cheaper per gigabyte.
When there are big sales, you'll usually find that PCIe 4.0 drives are more heavily discounted than PCIe 5.0 drives, which widens the gap even further.And it isn't like applications are getting any smaller.Battlefield 6, one of the biggest releases of 2025, was about 80 gigabytes.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was over 50GB, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II required 100GB of free space.Related How Much Storage Do You Really Need for PC Gaming? The more the merrier? In a nutshell, yes.Posts 1 By Goran Damnjanovic Applications, and games specifically, are getting bigger quickly, and your storage needs are going to grow faster than your need for speed.
Compatibility is not guaranteed Even if you were to spend the premium on the fastest drive you could buy today, there is absolutely no guarantee that any given application will actually make use of it today, or in the future.As one concrete example, DirectStorage—which promises to improve things like loading times—has been around for almost four years now and relatively few games can take advantage of it.A quick survey of the Steam store only showed some 70 games that support Direct Storage at all, and the one with the highest peak players is Monster Hunter Wilds.
Coincidentally, Monster Hunter Wilds had a software bug that seriously hurt performance for many players until they deleted a DLL associated with DirectStorage.Spider-Man 2's PC launch was plagued by a similar issue.They probably won't be the last.
Unless something changes dramatically, legacy games will support DirectStorage, and it turns out that the gains from the raw speed increases aren't what you'd expect from just looking at the spec sheet.A PCIe 5.0 drive might technically be four times faster than a top-shelf PCIe 3.0 drive, but you're not going to see loading screens cut down to a quarter of the time.Related Stop buying PCIe 5.0 SSDs for your gaming PC Doubling what you spend probably won't double your performance.
Posts 30 By Nick Lewis Realistically, the only applications you can count on scaling well with drive speed are things like photo or video editing apps, which sometimes have to load enormous files from storage into memory.Subscribe to our newsletter for smarter SSD buying Make better SSD choices—subscribe to the newsletter for practical storage guidance that prioritizes value per gigabyte, compatibility realities like DirectStorage, and deal-aware recommendations so you spend on capacity, not just raw speed.Subscribe By subscribing, you agree to receive newsletter and marketing emails, and accept our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
You can unsubscribe anytime.Even if newer technologies like DirectStorage do become more popular over the next few years, PCIe 3.0 or PCIe 4.0 drives are still several times faster than the fastest SATA SSD.Moreover, you have no guarantee that the PCIe 5.0 drive you buy today will be compatible with whatever iteration of DirectStorage exists five years from now Trying to future-proof your PC build based on current technology is nearly impossible.
Instead, you should design and build your PC around what you can and will use today and for the next two or three years—not five years.In that case, most people would be better off buying extra storage volume rather than extra storage speed, since we know for sure applications (especially games) aren't suddenly going to start getting smaller.WD Black 1TB SN850X NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Storage capacity 1TB Hardware Interface PCIe Gen 4 x4 NVMe This WD Black drive has Gen 4 speeds and it's perfect for your gaming rig or even your PlayStation 5.
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