Cyberpunk 2077 SSD Comparison: Kioxia VE10 Is More Stable

A PCIe 5.0 SSD roundup for Cyberpunk 2077 published on May 26, 2026 compared seven flagship drives under an AMD Ryzen 9950 X3D and MSI X870E Edge Ti WIFI test platform. The suite covered CrystalDiskMark, 3DMARK, PCMARK10, Iometer, AIDA64, DiskBench, Photoshop 2026, and Cyberpunk 2077 itself.

Among the seven, Kioxia EXCERIA PRO G2-VE10 stood out as the most consistently strong option. It was not the kind of drive that blew everything away in one headline number, but it stayed in the upper half across many tests and even climbed to the front in a few. On the 1TB model, that already translated into a solid result; with the 2TB and 4TB versions moving to BiCS 8 and 218-layer NAND, performance got better still. In the original judgment, that makes VE10 one of the more worthwhile PCIe 5.0 SSDs to buy right now.

Samsung 9100 PRO had a much rougher showing. It landed near the bottom in 4KB random mixed read/write, the 3DMARK storage benchmark, and the Cyberpunk 2077 Benchmark loading test. The weakest point was especially hard to ignore: at 825GB usage, its 4K random mixed speed fell to just 59.4 MB/s. For a flagship SSD, that is a poor look, and the overall impression is of a drive that keeps missing the moment that matters.

WD_BLACK SN8100 was more complicated. On paper, it looked strong in theoretical tests and daily-simulation workloads, but AIDA64 full-drive write told a different story. The bare drive finished in 1326 seconds, while the version with a heatsink took 1311 seconds instead, a tiny 15-second difference that makes the bare model oddly faster. Then there is the temperature problem: the surface hit 99C. That is not just warm; it is the kind of number that makes you look twice. On top of that, Sandisk announced a new SSD brand in January 2026, SANDISK Optimus, replacing the old WD_BLACK and WD Blue lines. The former WD_BLACK SN8100 was renamed SANDISK Optimus GX PRO 8100 NVMe SSD, so buyers need to pay close attention to both branding and model name.

Kioxia VE10 wins here not by posting one outrageous result, but by being reliably good in a lot of places. The 1TB model finished AIDA64 full-drive write in 1312 seconds with an average bandwidth of 727.06 MB/s, already a steady result. The 2TB version pushed further, reaching 14940 MB/s sequential read and 13419 MB/s sequential write in CrystalDiskMark. It also avoided the kind of obvious drop-offs that hurt some rivals in Iometer and PCMARK10. In short, the curve is stable, and the larger capacities do not feel like a simple storage upgrade with no performance gain.

That matters because SSD roundups are not really about peak numbers alone anymore. In games like Cyberpunk 2077, loading behavior affects the experience directly. In huge installs such as Red Desert, where storage needs reach 135GB and the official recommendation goes up to 150GB, capacity and consistency matter just as much as benchmarks. A drive that looks good in a chart but wobbles in real use is harder to trust than a steadier mid-to-upper-tier model.

So if you are buying a PCIe 5.0 SSD soon, Kioxia VE10 is one of the safer recommendations from this comparison. Samsung 9100 PRO was too uneven, and WD_BLACK SN8100 brought along temperature and branding headaches that make the choice less straightforward. VE10 is not the flashiest option, but it is the one that comes across as most likely to stay out of your way once installed.