You might not have heard of Biwin but it's made the best value PCIe 4.0 SSD we've tested in some time

I remember when prices collapsed for solid state drives. It started slow at first, but before we knew it, most PCIe 4.0 SSDs were tumbling into our shopping baskets with nary a second thought. Fond memories. Thankfully, any attempt to increase Gen4 SSD prices since then have largely failed, with drives like the Biwin Black Opal NV7400 making sure of that.

The NV7400 is powered by the same controller as our previous pick for the best budget SSD, Lexar's NM790. This is MaxioTech's MAP1602A. The NV7400 pairs this with either Micron or YMTC 232-Layer TLC NAND, whereas the Lexar only uses the latter. Effectively, though, they're pretty similar. Though by virtue of the NV7400's recent release—the NM790 came out in 2023—Biwin is able to offer a price tag on it that's lower than Lexar's best sale price today. Just $120 or £108 for 2 TB at MSRP.

That's $0.06 per gigabyte, or in other words, a mighty fine price tag to pay for a speedy solid state drive.

And speedy it is. The NV7400 is named as such for a reason, it reaches 7400 MB/s in sequential read tests. 7370 MB/s in our tests but we'll give it that. That's way up there with the best that PCIe 4.0 SSDs can offer today, and all in a drive that we would consider truly competitive on a budget.

Though random read/write speeds aren't anything to write home about (see what I did there?) as these are quite a bit off the pace of other PCIe 4.0 drives. This does matter, as well, as while everyone talks a big game with sequential speeds, it's random 4K speeds that make the biggest difference for gaming.

But we can overlook the drop-off in random tests, due to the high capacity and low price tag. Plus it still loads Final Fantasy XIV in 7.4 seconds, or roughly the same time as any other PCIe 4.0 drive we've tested recently, so it's not the end of the world for extra game storage.

You can read our full Biwin Black Opal NV7400 review for the bigger picture, or check out our guide below to the best SSDs for gaming today. PCIe 5.0 drives are the hot ticket today, and they're finally gaining in random read/write tests and coming down in price to make them worth consideration for gamers. Though you still won't find anything near as good value as this.

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The best SSDs for gaming