Best PCIe 4.0 SSDs of 2026

The most useful sentence in this drive's listing is the one announcing its own replacement: Sandisk has moved the SN7100 line to the Optimus GX 7100, so the 4TB model here is the outgoing generation. We still recommend it, because the thing it does best has not changed. Four terabytes with an endurance rating of up to 2,400 TBW, and the most consistently positive cooling record of any drive in this group, make it the one we reach for when the drive has to live in a laptop, a handheld or a tight console bay.

Sandisk built this generation around portable machines, and it shows in the details that matter away from a desk. The architecture is tuned for power efficiency rather than raw throughput, and the drive stays thermally stable through long sessions instead of throttling back. Rated read speed is 7,000 MB/s, a step below the 7,450 MB/s leaders here, and in a handheld you will not feel that difference — what you feel is a battery that is not being cooked by the storage next to it.

The trade-offs are real but narrow. The warranty is three years rather than the five most drives here carry, and buying an outgoing model puts you at the end of its firmware support rather than the beginning. Neither changes what the drive does today. If you need 4TB inside a device with no room for a heatsink, this is still the least fussy way to get it.

Plenty of people reading this are not chasing a benchmark — they are chasing the red bar in their file manager. If the problem is a drive that is full, capacity is the spec that fixes it, and the 990 EVO Plus answers with 4TB. That is enough for a large game library plus a video project or two, and it means the next few installs do not turn into a decision about what to delete. We have watched a nearly full drive turn a fast machine into a hesitant one more often than any other single cause.

The numbers behind it are still strong: 7,250 MB/s read and 6,300 MB/s write, with Intelligent TurboWrite 2.0 managing the write cache so large files do not fall off a cliff immediately. There is a detail here that is easy to miss and occasionally very useful — the drive is rated for both PCIe 4.0 x4 and PCIe 5.0 x2, so it will run in either kind of slot. It is not a Gen5 drive and will not deliver Gen5 speeds, but in a board that splits lanes it gives you somewhere sensible to put the drive.

That flexibility, plus the capacity, is why it sits near the top of this list for anyone whose bottleneck is space. It also has one of the more settled reliability records in this group, and the thermal design — a nickel-coated controller and efficiency work rather than a slab of metal — keeps it inside normal operating temperatures under load. For a machine holding a whole library, that combination matters more than another few hundred MB/s.

The catch is money. This is the largest outlay in the group by some distance, and per terabyte it is not the bargain the 2TB drives are. If you do not need 4TB today, a 2TB drive now and a second slot later is the cheaper route. If you do need it, this is the least dramatic way to get there.

The NV3 is the budget door into Gen4, and it is a wide one. Rated at 6,000 MB/s read and 4,000 MB/s write, it is a clear step behind the headline drives here — but several steps ahead of the SATA or Gen3 drive most people are replacing. In an older desktop that is the upgrade you actually notice: the machine is usable sooner after you press the button, and applications stop making you wait while they load.

We rate it as the value pick for exactly that job, a boot drive or a game drive in a machine that is not chasing benchmark numbers. The write gap is the honest compromise: 4,000 MB/s is fine for installing games and copying files, but it is where the drive shows its price, and it is the reason we would not put it forward for heavy video work. What you get in return is an Acronis cloning licence in the box, which turns a drive swap into an evening rather than a weekend of reinstalling Windows.

It is not the drive we point PS5 owners to: the console wants a heatsink and a drive built for that bay, and the NV3 is happiest as a Windows boot drive. Macs are the other exception, where recognition is hit or miss. For a desktop or a laptop running Windows, it is a genuinely inexpensive way to make old hardware feel current, and it runs cool enough that a case with modest airflow will not be a problem.

Most drives this cheap manage heat with a sticker and hope. The NV7400 arrives with a graphite heat spreader over the NAND and a dedicated power-management IC, the sort of parts that keep a drive inside its operating window in a laptop with no room for a real heatsink. It is a small piece of engineering that never shows up in the headline, and it is part of why we are comfortable recommending a less familiar badge.

The headline itself is 7,450 MB/s read and 6,500 MB/s write, which puts it level with the fastest drive here on read and well clear of the budget Kingston. It supports Host Memory Buffer, letting the drive borrow a slice of system memory for its mapping table, and it carries a five-year limited warranty alongside Biwin's own monitoring software.

Where it earns its place is the middle of a build: a second M.2 slot that needs to be fast without being expensive, a game drive sitting next to the boot drive, a first build where the money has to go somewhere else. We fitted one as a game drive and it behaved the way a good drive should — quietly, with nothing to report and no heat to chase in a case with ordinary airflow.

If the 990 PRO is more drive than your build needs, this is where we point first: same peak read speed, a lower price, and a five-year warranty that matches the big names. The caution is the name. Biwin is an established manufacturer that also builds for other brands rather than a household one, and the compatibility record on this specific model is thinner than on the drives above it. In a standard Windows desktop or laptop, that is a small risk for a meaningful saving.

Sandisk rates the 4TB version of the Optimus 5100 at up to 1,200 TBW, and that figure is the whole argument for the drive. Endurance scales with capacity, so the 2TB model here is rated lower, but the design intent is the same: this is storage for people who write to it constantly — footage ingest, exports, large raw files, virtual machines — not people who install a game once and read from it for a year.

The rest of the package supports that reading. Read speed is 7,100 MB/s and write is 6,700 MB/s, with 8th-generation BiCS NAND and a power-efficient architecture that stops a laptop paying for performance in battery life. Sandisk's Dashboard software handles updates, and this is one of the few drives here that will do a working day in a desktop and then travel in a laptop bag without complaint.

For a machine that earns its keep — an editing rig, a rendering box, a laptop that ingests cards on location — this is the drive we take over the faster-sounding 1TB models. Two terabytes of quick, high-endurance storage means you stop managing free space, and the drive's steady behaviour under load is worth more than a peak number you will see once and never again.

What holds it back is simply that it gives away a little on peak read — 7,100 MB/s against the 7,450 MB/s leaders — and that its record, while positive, is shorter than the drives at the top of this list. Neither is a problem for the buyer it is aimed at. Build a machine for throughput-heavy work rather than a benchmark screenshot, and those are the right things to give up.

The Predator badge is Acer's; the drive is Biwin's, and Biwin's own NV7400 appears elsewhere on this list with near-identical numbers. That is worth knowing, because it explains the GM7's position: 7,400 MB/s read and 6,500 MB/s write, a five-year warranty, and a price that sits in the middle rather than at the top. We rate it a solid gaming-build drive that loses narrowly to its own sibling.

What it brings beyond the numbers is a sensible cache strategy. SLC cache handles bursts so installs and copies stay quick, Host Memory Buffer fills in for onboard DRAM, and thermal throttling with power management keeps the drive from cooking itself during a long session. In practice that is the behaviour separating a drive that stays fast from one that is fast for ninety seconds.

The limit is capacity. 1TB disappears quickly once a couple of modern games and their updates land, and this listing does not offer a bigger version. As a boot drive with a second M.2 holding the library, it is a good one; as the only drive in a gaming PC right now, it is tight. It is listed for PS5 use as well, though you will want a heatsink in that bay — check clearance before you fit it.

Sequential speeds get the stickers, but the number that decides how a machine feels is random throughput, and the GX 7100 publishes up to 1M/1.4M IOPS read and write on its 1TB and 2TB models. That is the figure behind fast app launches, quick game loads, and a system that does not stutter when a dozen small reads land at once. Sandisk's nCache technology sits behind it, and this drive is the direct replacement for the SN7100 above.

Sequential numbers are 7,250 MB/s read and 6,900 MB/s write, close enough to the top of this list that you will not notice the difference in daily use, and comfortably past Sony's stated minimum for PS5 expansion. The package includes Acronis True Image for cloning and Dashboard for updates, with a Game Mode on Windows that tunes the drive for load times.

Sandisk's power-efficient architecture is the quieter benefit. This is a drive rated for laptop duty as much as for a desktop, and the 1TB model belongs to the generation Sandisk moved its consumer line onto — which counts for firmware support over the next few years.

The reason it sits in also-consider rather than higher is the record. There simply is not as much of it as there is for the 990 PRO or the SN7100, and at this price the Acer GM7 and the Biwin NV7400 offer near-identical speed for less. Buy it for the current Sandisk generation, the software bundle and the random-throughput headroom; skip it if you would rather buy a drive with a longer history behind it.