Storage is the part of a gaming PC people forget until the day a download fails with "not enough space". An SSD (solid-state drive) is where Windows, your games and your saves live, and two choices matter: how much space you buy, and which kind of SSD it is. Both are easier than the box labels make them sound.
Drive makers count in decimal: 1 TB is 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Windows counts in binary units but still writes "GB", so a drive sold as 1 TB shows up as about 931 GB. A 2 TB drive shows about 1,863 GB. Nothing is broken; it is just two ways of counting. Windows and your everyday apps then take tens of gigabytes before you install a single game.
Many big, recent games take around 100–150 GB each, and a few go well beyond that. Smaller and older games are often 5–30 GB. Updates and extra content keep adding to the size over time. That is why a "1 TB" drive tends to feel roomy for two weeks and cramped after two months. Try it with your own habits below.
Time to copy this library onto a new drive at each type's best-case speed:
All three types store the same games. The difference is how fast data moves, and what plugs into where.
Hard drives (HDD) have spinning platters. They are cheap per gigabyte but slow, usually around 100–200 MB/s for large files and much slower for lots of small ones. They are fine for a shelf of rarely played games, and a poor home for Windows.
SATA SSDs use the old SATA cable and top out at about 550 MB/s in practice, because the connection itself is the limit. They are a big step up from a hard drive.
NVMe SSDs are small sticks that plug into an M.2 slot on the motherboard. A PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive can reach roughly 7,000 MB/s in sequential reads; for example Samsung lists up to 7,450 MB/s for the 990 Pro and Crucial lists up to 7,100 MB/s for the P310. Newer PCIe 5.0 drives go faster still, but they cost more and usually run hotter.
Only up to a point. Moving from a hard drive to any SSD is a big, noticeable change. Moving from a SATA SSD to a fast NVMe drive usually saves far less time in games than the speed numbers suggest, because loading also depends on your processor and on how the game is built. That is why spending on capacity usually pays off before spending on the very fastest drive. A mid-range PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive is a sensible default today, and it is often priced close to a SATA SSD of the same size.
One practical check before you buy: look in your motherboard's manual for a free M.2 slot, and for which generation it supports. If you only have SATA ports free, a SATA SSD is the way to go.
At every budget, get a drive that is not nearly full on day one: leaving roughly 10–20% free keeps updates working and tends to keep speeds up.
Tight budget: choose a 1 TB drive rather than a faster 500 GB one, and make sure it is an SSD, not a hard drive. A PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 NVMe is fine. Expect to pay around €150–200.
Middle budget: 2 TB of PCIe 4.0 NVMe is the comfortable size for most players with several big games installed. Around €250–350. Check that the drive's sequential speeds are listed and that the seller is a known shop.
Bigger budget: a well-known high-end PCIe 4.0 drive with a long warranty, or a second drive so Windows and games are kept apart. Around €350 and up. Heatsinks matter more on very fast drives; many motherboards already include one for the M.2 slot.
Prices of storage move a lot, so treat these ranges as a rough guide, and see the example picks below for what is on offer right now.