SSD or HDD for gaming?

Is an SSD better than an HDD for gaming?

Yes: an SSD loads games about twice as fast as an HDD, and an HDD only wins on price per TB. Notebookcheck clocked GTA V at 27.8 seconds from the PS5's SSD against 56.8 seconds from a Seagate BarraCuda hard drive, and a 2 TB NVMe drive costs about 2.7 times more per TB than a 4 TB hard drive. The full buying field is in Best NVMe SSD for gaming UK 2026.

How much faster does an SSD load games than an HDD?

About twice as fast, with the biggest gap in the biggest games. Two named sources agree on the size of the step:

• Notebookcheck measured GTA V at 27.8 s on the PS5 SSD against 56.8 s on the hard drive, Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 20.0 s against 35.5 s, and The Outer Worlds at 7.5 s against 14.9 s.
• PC Gamer's Anthem test put the hard drive at roughly 78 to 85 seconds to reach the load screen and a fast SATA SSD at about 59 to 60 seconds, around 20 seconds quicker.

Compare Electronic subtracted the Notebookcheck times: the SSD saves 29.0 s in GTA V, 15.5 s in Shadow of the Tomb Raider and 7.4 s in The Outer Worlds. Notebookcheck's test is from the console launch period, so the absolute times are dated, and the ratio of roughly 2 to 1 is the usable finding. An SSD cuts loading, not frame rates: a game already running plays at the same fps from either drive.

Worked cost of the gain: a 2 TB library costs £85.50 on a hard drive at £42.75 per TB, against £229.99 for the Crucial P310 2TB, a £144.49 premium. A player who loads a GTA V-sized game 10 times a week saves 290 seconds a week, 4.2 hours a year, so the premium works out at about £34.50 per hour saved. Players who relaunch big games often recoup the gap sooner.

What does an SSD cost per TB, and where does an HDD still fit?

An HDD costs £42.75 per TB and the cheapest 2 TB SSD £115.00 per TB on Amazon UK, so a hard drive still fits bulk storage. Compare Electronic divided each price by capacity.

The Crucial P310 2TB and the SATA Crucial BX500 2TB cost the same £229.99, so a buyer with an M.2 slot should never pay SATA money for SATA speed: Crucial rates the P310 at up to 7,100 MB/s read, and the BX500 listing says up to 540 MB/s. A hard drive still fits three jobs: a 4 TB library of rarely played titles, backups, and media. The external hard drive guide covers portable options, and How much storage does a PS5 need? covers consoles.

Is an SSD better than an HDD in a gaming laptop, and does NVMe matter?

Yes on both counts: a laptop's drive needs speed, shock resistance and a small footprint, and an M.2 NVMe SSD supplies all three. The Crucial P310 1TB reads at up to 7,100 MB/s, and the Seagate BarraCuda store specification lists about 190 MB/s, a 37-fold gap on paper. Real load times narrow it, since the CPU also prepares assets while a game loads.

Endurance is the other worry, and it is a small one. Crucial rates the P310 2TB at 440 TB written with a 5-year warranty. At 50 GB written every day, 440 TB lasts 8,800 days, about 24 years. Buyers fitting a drive into an ageing machine can read How to upgrade an old gaming PC in 2026.

Which SSD should you buy for gaming?

The Crucial P310 2TB is the best-value main drive for gaming, at £229.99 on Amazon UK at the time of writing (October 2026). It reads at up to 7,100 MB/s on PCIe 4.0 and costs the same as a SATA drive of equal size.

The P310 2TB suits a desktop or laptop with a free M.2 slot. Its compromises are QLC NAND, which writes more slowly once its cache fills, and no DRAM cache. Buyers who copy very large files often should pick the WD_BLACK SN850X.

Three alternatives cover a cheaper drive, a faster drive and an older PC, at Amazon UK prices in October 2026.

Verdict

An SSD is better than an HDD for gaming: it loads about twice as fast, per Notebookcheck, and the HDD wins only on cost per TB at £42.75 against £115.00. The Crucial P310 2TB at £229.99 is the value pick, and the WD_BLACK SN850X 1TB at £178.99 suits heavy writers. The ranked shortlist is in Best NVMe SSD for gaming UK 2026.