My P41 has never felt slow, so tell me what a Gen5 drive actually changed for you

Question

Putting together a new build over the next month or so and I keep going back and forth on the boot drive. The Gen5 flagships have sequential numbers that look absolutely stupid on paper, the Samsung 9100 Pro is around 14,800 read, and part of me just wants the biggest number.

Then I look at the price gap. As of june, drives were sitting at maybe 2-3x what they were in 2025, and I read all the heatsink and throttling talk and lose the nerve. My current machine has a Platinum P41 2TB and it has honestly never once felt slow.

So I want actual lived experience here, not spec sheets. Anyone gaming on a Gen5 drive who can tell me it changed something real?

jamesm · Accepted Answer

Gen4 already saturates game loading, you are not going to see load times move. What Gen5 actually buys you is 10-14W bursts and a drive that throttles inside a minute without a proper heatsink. Those sequential numbers only cash out on sustained large transfers, video work and the like. Put the price gap into the GPU instead.

rgbwhenever · Answer

I run a Platinum P51 and I do like it, but I am not going to pretend it made my games load different. Bought it for the looks and the headroom. It needed actual cooling though.

alexc · Answer

meanwhile my Gen3 drive loads the same game and I sleep fine