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PCIe SSD: The next upgrade for your rig

In recent years big AAA games have become extremely bloated. When they started crossing the 50GB mark we thought that would be the end of it, but they’ve continued to grow into 100GB+ monstrosities that take forever to download and, sometimes, forever to load once they’re actually on your computer.

Even those with the fastest fibre out there will find it irritating, staring into a black screen as the progress bar or wheel endlessly fills.

While you can’t do anything about big modern game development, you can do something about the PC that you play your games on. In the past this meant upgrading from a mechanical hard drive to a solid state drive (SSD). While these offer a leap in speeds, they can’t compete with the new kids on the block: SSDs which connect to your PC over PCIe.

This new kind of storage drive offers a truly generational leap in performance when it comes to read / write speeds, with Transcend’s PCIe SSD 220S being a shinning example in this category.

As measured in CrystalDiskMark, the PCIe SSD 220S has a maximum sequential read / write speed of 3 500 / 2 800 MB/s on the largest one terabyte offering. With mechanical hard drives measuring in at a fraction of that, and SATA SSDs at a few thousand on either side (if that), there’s just no type of storage medium out there that gets you into a game faster.

The PCIe SSD 220S uses the NVMe standard, meaning that it slots into most motherboards taking up very little space. At just 8 X 2.2 centimetres, this drive can fit into motherboards whether they have the NVMe connection on the top or the bottom. This means that this tech isn’t just for large desktops, as you can easily slot this into most laptops, as long as it supports the NVMe connector.

As mentioned earlier you can get this drive with up to one terabyte of storage. If you prefer indie games and don’t want that much space, 256GB and 512GB options are also available, so you can benefit from the additional speed on offer here without paying for storage you don’t need.

Finally, we’ve been talking only about PCs up until now because no modern console has a PCIe connector for their storage devices. With rumours about upcoming consoles finally solving the woeful loading times of past iterations, we may see regular SSDs or even PCIe SSDs next year when new consoles are slated to hit the market. If history is anything to go by, these stock drives will usually be slower than what you can by now, as evidenced by the fact that consoles usually used 5 400 RPM hard drives when 7 200 RPM was the norm on PC. It’s worth scoping out PCIe drives now, even if you like sticking to console.

To get your own Transcend PCIe SSD 220S, head on over to local retailer FirstShop which stocks it as well as many other speedy storage solutions.

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