Bang for buck king of 4TB m.2 SSD's in late 2023 when I got it. Went for around $165. The price has creeped up since then but its still a solid bargain here in early 2024.
Uses the Realtek RTS5762 controller (low cost but decent performance) with Hynix TLC flash (decent price, performance, and durability for a consumer drive at .5 DWPD) and has 128MB of DRAM to act as a buffer. Some of the TLC flash is ran in a pseudo "SLC cache" mode to improve performance which is how this thing performs so well despite using lower cost components.
That performance will drop pretty hard if you get the drive near full because of that. So don't try to fill up more than 75% of the way if you want high performance. At 4TB though that still leaves plenty of space so IMO its not a big deal.
It will still certainly beat the heck out of a lot of the QLC trash drives that are usually what sell for this price in this capacity range even when near full though.
The supported PCIe gen is "only" 3.0 but that is still --perfectly-- fine, really quite good IMO, for almost anything you would need out of a consumer SSD in 2023/2024 and probably 2025 or 2026 at least as well.
The generation of PCIe only effects max data transfer rates (that is linear reads/writes) which hardly matters at all for most desktop use cases once you get to PCIe 3.0 speeds. ===Its low queue depth random read/write performance that matters for desktops.=== Yes even in gaming. And this SSD does pretty well there thanks to its caching scheme despite the cheaper controller.
To get significantly better performance than this drive you would have to step up to buying a Optane SSD (getting harder to find in late 2023 and still fairly expensive if you want more than 2TB, probably will need u.2 adapter as well.......) or a MUUUCH higher cost enterprise class SSD like a Kioxia CD8P or CM7, or the Solidigm P5810, or a Memblaze PBlaze7 7940 drives. Which are also not m.2 and did I mention how terribly expensive they are??
Note that this MIIIIIGHT change if Microsoft's Direct Storage ever really takes off among software developers. Right now that easily seems years away at best though. I think only 1-2 games support it as of early 2024. At least 1 of which sucks fairly badly (Forspoken) and the other has some serious bugs that making playing irritating. And this drive will still benefit a whole lot from software that properly uses Direct Storage anyways so you don't have to worry about it for a long long time.
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Solid State Drive |
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