What's the Best Storage Setup for a Gaming PC?

Sourced from real discussions on r/buildapc and r/pcgaming, cross-checked against live PricePerGig listings.

The best and most simplest storage setup for a gaming pc is 100% SSD storage, that’s a super fast NVMe drive, about 8TB should do you - however that’s also about $2000 as of writing this in August 2026! So While that might very well be the ‘best’ storage for a gaming setup, it’s not one you’ll see me recommending.

Let’s consider what and why storage is even important for gaming in the first place. I mean, you’ve likely just purchased or in the market to purchase the biggest, fattest graphics card you can afford to run the most glorious games at 1440p with a whopping 100fps or more, or perhaps you’re happy with a more modest 1080p setup which will zoom perfectly on your new 4k display every pixel to 4 pixels on the display. Why does storage even matter?

There is a reason all the latest games consoles also use SSD, and that’s loading the glorious textures (the developer term for ‘pictures we’ll later put over thousands of triangles to make the image look… textured’), some of those textures are 100MB alone, and you are never loading just one! consider your current 3rd person shooter, you’ve got the gun, the head, the hand and each one is divided into 10s if not 100’s of separate images (down to the finger nails!). so we’re loading literally GB of data from the game file (that took what feels like forever to download) and whacking all that into your super, incredibly fast graphics card memory (VRAM - Video Random Access Memory).

And every new level, or even just new area, corner your turn, we need to load MORE textures and throw the old ones out (the game was about 100GB to download and your graphics card has 8, maybe 16GB, it’s not all going to fit!) and we’re going to do this over, and over every time your turn a corner, or make a super high jump to look into the distance - yes we’re in 2026, and the game engine plays many ticks, for instance when looking at the mountain from very far away, the texture loaded is likely only a few MB, but when you get up close, it will be a glorious, super detailed and in the case of Red Dead or HALO a ‘real’ photograph of each rock even ! so yes, we’re constantly loading large images/textures from the game download into your graphics card.

Do we want the game to stutter? no, so we’re going SSD.

So back to the ‘the best gaming setup for storage’ - you want the game on SSD, 100%, no questions asked if it’s a big fat AAA title like GTA5 or GTA6 or similar - but you don’t want to wait an age to download the game over and over (like you have to on a games console, this is fantastic PC gaming).

Store the games you download on a large, spinning HDD - buy the cheapest / best price per GB for the library you’d like to have locally, likely 4TB minimum.

then use a 1TB SSD for your Windows/Boot drive and copy the games you’re currently playing to there to actually play - achieving a fully optimised gaming setup without wasting $$$ - go spend it on more games instead!

The table above compares the live price per TB for the two drives this setup needs on your marketplace, the big cheap library drive against the fast drive you actually play from.

The ideal two drive setup

Here is the layout that works for almost everyone.

• A mid-range NVMe SSD for Windows and the games you are actively playing. This is where speed is felt, in load times and asset streaming.
• A bigger, cheaper drive for your wider library, recordings, downloads and games you are not currently playing.

Shuffle games between them as your tastes change. Active titles live on the fast drive, the rest sits on cheap storage until you fancy them again.

Simple, fast, and easy on the wallet.

How much of each

Sizing it right saves money and hassle.

• NVMe: 1TB minimum, 2TB if your budget stretches, because modern games are enormous and a single title can swallow a big chunk.
• Bulk drive: a large spinning hard drive, 4TB minimum, bought purely on best price per TB. This is the library, the downloads and everything you are not playing this week.

Running out of fast storage mid-download is annoying, so lean toward 2TB on the NVMe if you can. Check the live prices above for the sweet spot.

Skip the gen 5 trap

This is where gamers overspend, so heed the warning.

Top-tier gen 5 NVMe drives cost a clear premium, run hot, and load games a rounding error faster than a good gen 4. The console-style fast loading you want is already there on a solid mid-range drive.

Buy a good gen 4 NVMe, pocket the difference, and put it toward capacity instead. Speed you cannot feel is not worth paying for.

A note on backups

Quick reminder, because game saves and personal files live here too.

Your storage setup is for speed and space, not safety. If your PC holds anything irreplaceable, keep a separate backup.

Games you can redownload. Your photos and documents you cannot, so make sure those have a second home.

The bottom line

The best gaming PC storage is a mid-range NVMe for Windows and active games, plus a bigger cheap drive for the rest of your library.

Size the NVMe at 1TB or ideally 2TB, skip the gen 5 premium, and use the live prices above to buy the best value for each role. Fast where you play, cheap where you store, and not a penny wasted on speed you will never notice.

The best gaming setup for your storage right now is a hybrid of a HDD for the downloads and the games you’re not currently playing but will do shortly, and an SSD (either SATA or M.2/NVMe connection) to play them from.

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