2025 might be the best time to buy a PCIe 5 SSD

The long-standing advice for PC storage for gamers, workers, and everyone in between has always been, “Just use an SSD.” It didn’t matter too much if you were using a PCIe 3 SSD, a PCIe 4 SSD, or even an older SATA SSD. The on-paper performance advances in the top drives just didn’t deliver the kind of real-world advantages that would make it worth recommending them every time.

But that may be starting to change with a whole new generation of NVMe 2.0 SSDs, which are faster, leaner, and more capable than ever before.