Hello citizens, back in 2017 Intel and CIG advertised that Star Citizen will benefit from super fast storage drives like Intels Optane SSDs. Now, 2025, Optane is dead and there are way faster M.2 SSDs with PCIe 5.0 speeds up to 14.900 MB/s and way faster access times than PCIe 4.0 and 3.0 SSDs. Because i always was curious how much Star Citizens loading times would improve with the latest drives, i bought one and tested it for you. At the moment, the fastest 5.0 drive is the Western Digital Black SN8100. Its lightly ahead of Samsungs latest 5.0 drive. I bought the 2TB version for 220 Euro here in Germany. I decided to test Star Citizen at least 5 times with each drive. For comparison i have the predecessor Western Digital Black SN850X with PCIe 4.0 connection. I tested the loading time from desktop to main menu and from main menu to the PU at the space station Baijini Point (Arc Corp). After each test i restarted my computer. My motherboard is a ASUS TUF Gaming X670E-Plus and die CPU is a AMD Ryzen 9800X3D @ 5,5 Ghz. Here are the results: The result is sobering. When we just look at the data from the PCIe 4.0 drive we can see differences of up to 6 seconds from run to run. So why these almost random numbers? When i look at the Task Manager and the drive usage while testing, i can see the the drives are used only in a fraction of the loading time. For example, when i load from the main menu to the PU, the first 15-20 seconds the SSD drive is barely used at all with 0-3% usage. After these 15-20 seconds the SSD drive starts to work and is transfering up to 600 - 1000 MB/s for only about 5-10 seconds. So the SSD drive is doing heavy work only for about a few seconds despite loading times of 30+ seconds. Whats happening here? My guess is that the game client is waiting for data from the server. At first the server needs to verify your data and then loading your status, position, hangar and ship data and transfer the needed data to your client. These steps take different amounts of time each time, depending on the server load. The same applies to the loading from desktop the to main menu, when the client is starting to communicate with the server and your account data will be checked. Barely drive usage at all. Conclusion? Right now, it's completely unnecessary to buy a PCIe 5.0 drive, as 99% of the time you won't notice any difference in loading times and you're still dependent on the netcode and the servers. It is possible that we will see bigger differences in loading times in Squadron42, when the game client doesnt have to communicate with the server.