KITGURU SHORTLISTS: THE BEST SOLID STATE DRIVE OF 2025

Another of the big guns to finally release a PCIe 5.0 SSD is Sandisk, whose WD_Black SN8100 drive is the company's latest flagship drive. Designed for workstations, high-end desktops and notebooks, the drive has official sequential read/write figures of up to 14,900MB/s and 14,000MB/s, respectively.

Corsair have regularly been updating the MP700 Gen 5 product line ever since the original MP700 launched. The latest MP700 model, the MP700 Pro XT, is the fastest one yet, making good use of Phison's PS5028-E28 controller. It's not only the fastest MP700 to date - in some of our tests, it's the fastest drive we've seen, full stop.

Not one to rest on their laurels, Crucial decided that the Gen 5 T700 isn't quite quick enough, so we now have the T705, the new flagship of the company's SSD range. Although basically using the same hardware as the T700, the T705 has everything turned up to the max - so instead of the 12,400MB/s and 11,800MB/s for Sequential read and writes respectively for the 2TB T700, the new 2TB T705 drive is rated at up to 14,500MB/s for reads and 12,700MB/s for writes.

Kingston's latest addition to the Fury line of SSD drives is an important one. The Fury Renegade G5 is the company's first consumer drive to use a PCIe 5.0 interface, and it combines very fast performance with impressive thermals. It's a very good drive, though it doesn't come cheap!

Seagate's FireCuda 540 uses the same controller/NAND combination as the other three Gen 5 drives we've tested; Phsion S5026-E26 controller and 232-Layer Micron B58R TLC NAND, with Seagate paying close attention to the controller firmware. The E26 supports NAND data transfer speeds of up to 2,400 MT/s but Seagate have chosen to run the NAND at 1,600MT/s, hence the 10,000MB/s Sequential speed ratings.