Solid State Drives (SSD) have advantages for gamers over using Hard Disk Drives (HDD) by saving game level and loading times, and by giving many apps a noticeable performance boost. SSD pricing has recently softened, and we now use a 480 GB SATA III 3D NAND SSD as our C drive. Last week, Kingston sent us their entry-level 480 GB A1000 NVMe SSD (SA1000M8/480G) which they claim is ‘affordable’ as well as “twice as fast as a SATA-based SSD”, and we are here to test it.

BTR uses two identical boot drives – one for AMD and one for NVIDIA – together with a 1.92 TB SanDisk SSD for our primary game storage and a 2 TB Seagate FireCuda SSHD (Solid State Hard Drive) for additional storage. In addition, we just purchased a 2 TB Micron 1100 SSD from Rakuten/Platinum Micro on sale for $269 which will replace our 2 TB SSHD, and we now have an all-SSD PC.