Warp speed SSD upgrades to satisfy an unusual system requirement
Starfieldis almost unique among PC games for demanding – not merely suggesting or recommending –SSDstorage as part of its officialsystem requirements. As far as I can tell, only Bethesda’s galaxy-spanningRPGandCyberpunk 2077: Phantom Libertymake such a stipulation.
Are these requirements justified? In Bethesda’s case, it’s at least accurate:Starfield on a hard drive is downright broken. Faster storage is plainly necessary, so here are some solid state recommendations: a selection of our favourite SSDs that will get your PC good and ready for someStarfieldspace trucking.
It’s increasingly difficult to overstate the performance advantage of SSDs over HDDs – besides spending less time on load screens, you’ll also benefit from faster Windows booting and improved texture streaming speeds, maybe even a visible reduction of stuttering in certain games as well.
Around the last time Bethesda launcheda new game, the catch was that SSDs cost many coins more than an equally capacious HDD, making it trickier to secure enough capacity. However, in the year of Starfield, that price gap has narrowed significantly. It’s now easily possible to get a chunky 1TB SSD for only a few quid more than a 1TB hard drive; I’ve included a couple of the best-performing budget SSDs in the list below.
Likewise, if you want to prepare your PC for as speedy a Starfield spree as possible, there are also some megafast PCIe 4.0 SSDs here to choose from. Double check that yourCPUandmotherboardsupport this interface before you buy, but most components released in the last few years should be ok. You can ignore even newer PCIe 5.0 drives for now, as they’relaughably expensiveand don’t provide the performance improvements to match.
Read on for the full list of picks, or click the links just below to jump to specific SSDs. Once you’re set, you can also use our handy guide onhow to install an SSD, appeasing that Starfield system requirement once and for all.
The best SSDs for Starfield
To anyone concerned about the cost of outfitting their PC with a new SSD, look upon theWD Blue SN570and rejoice. Despite being absolutely filthy cheap for an NVMe drive – a decently-sized 500GB model will only cost about half as much as Starfield itself – its performance is eager and lively, improving massively on WD’s previous budget-minded Blue SSDs. In the AS SSD random read benchmark (a good one for gaming SSDs, as load times are based on read speeds) it scored 42MB/s, not too far off the 57MB/s that both the WD Black SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro recorded.
The Blue SN570 uses the PCIe 3.0 interface, so the only downside might be that it isn’t as futureproof as a 4.0 model. But then, its peak speeds are already going to be several times faster than those of any hard drive on the market, not to mention a damn sight quicker than even the finest SATA-based drives. It will definitely be able to handle Starfield, and years upon years of games beyond that.
Read more in ourWD Blue SN570 review
Another happy development in SSD land is that the choice of good-value PCIe 4.0 drives is widening. The Crucial P3 Plus is a worthy example of this, though my current pick of the cheap PCIe 4.0 SSDs is theLexar SN790. This comfortably and repeatedly bested the P3 Plus in our performance benchmarks, and especially on read speeds, the ones a game like Starfield will benefit most from.
It should be a great pick for shaving off the seconds on load times, too. It got into aShadow of the Tomb Raidersave, menu to playable, in 7 seconds dead – of all the SSDs we’ve ever tested, that’s the joint-third best on record, only behind the WD Black SN850X and Samsung 990 Pro and tied with an early engineering sample of the Crucial T700. All of which are considerably pricier SSDs, especially the PCIe 5.0-powered T700.
TheWD Black SN850Xis a cracking all-round gaming SSD, balancing excellent read and write speeds that will give your entire system a boost. Its Shadow of the Tomb Raider load speed result of 6.7s bodes particularly well for Starfield, as that’s the second-fastest we’ve ever seen.
Why not go all the way with the Samsung 990 Pro, which was a fraction of a second quicker? Samsung’s fellow PCIe 4.0 champion is indeed an excellent choice, though I’d argue the Black SN850X pips it for general desirability, with much higher write speeds and a lower price making it just ever-so-slightly a better deal. Actually, come to mention it, the Black SN850X has enjoyed plenty of price drops since we first tested it, so while it is the best premium SSD right now, it’s not outrageously expensive either.
It would be unfair to call theSamsung 990 Proa loading speed merchant and little else. This is the latest in a long line of quality Samsung-badged NVMe drives, beating pretty much all of the PCIe 4.0 competition on both random and sequential read speeds. You’d have to upgrade all the way to PCIe 5.0 to get anything significantly faster and, judging by what we’ve seen of these next-gen SSDs to far… you shouldn’t.
To be clear, though, the 990 Pro’s ability to slash waiting times is unmatched. Its 6.6s result in the Shadow of the Tomb Raider benchmark remains an RPS record, so if the presence of an SSD requirement in Starfield’s minimum specs is giving you the willies, nothing else will better address your load time concerns. Like the Black SN850X, it’s also much more affordable now than it was last year, even if you couldn’t exactly call it a budget SSD.
The spread of M.2 slots on modern motherboards means that yes, PCIe/NVMe drives are usually the way to go – ato say nothing of their massive performance advantage over older SATA drives. And yet, these older, bulkier SSDs will still handily outpace any hard drive, and will satisfy Starfield’s solid state craving. For those on older systems and limited upgrade budgets, then, a new slice of SATA could be ideal, and there’s none better than theSamsung 870 Evo.
Read more in ourSamsung 870 Evo review
