If you’ve ever snapped a 10,000 mAh magnetic battery or other bulky accessory to the back of your compatible Android or iPhone, you know how cumbersome it can be, especially while you’re trying to use your phone rather than just letting it charge. For those who are shooting video or backing up their files on the go, Lexar wants to make that problem go away with its latest external SSD, the Muse.

At just 80×48×3.8 mm (3.15x1.89x0.15 inches), with tapered edges that make it feel even slimmer, the company calls it the world’s thinnest portable SSD. And compared to the best external SSDs we’ve tested, it certainly stands out for its tiny size.

But to get that slim and small, the company is using a proprietary snap-on cable (Lexar calls it SnapLink) that connects to the back of the drive magnetically, via pogo pins. And the pogo pin side looks kind of bulky compared to the drive itself. If you want the drive to magnetically attach to your phone, you’ll need to slide the drive into its sleeve first, which also looks like it could do double duty as a card wallet.

In other words, Lexar made serious functional design sacrifices to achieve its slim storage superlative. Still, there’s no denying that the Muse will take up a lot less space on the back of your phone than alternatives like Orico’s BookDrive P10Plus.

Aside from its unique slimness and requisite accessories, the Muse looks to be a fairly typical 10 Gbps drive, with Lexar promising read speeds up to 1,050 MB/s, and write speeds up to 1,000 MB/s. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of sustained write performance is possible in such a thin shell.

As a USB-C storage device, the drive will of course also work with Macs, Android devices, and PCs (although you may need to format the drive first to support other operating systems). Lexar also notes there is app support for automatically backing up footage from iPhones, specifically.

Lexar says the Muse portable SSD will be available in 512 and 1TB capacities, sometime in the last quarter of 2026. Official pricing is up in the air, but representatives at IFA told us the company was aiming for roughly $230 for the 512GB model and $380 for 1TB. As always, devices that claim things like “world’s thinnest” tend to carry a price premium.

Expanding your PlayStation 5's storage with the best PS5 SSDs in 2026 is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. Modern AAA games are only getting bigger and more demanding, which will saturate your console's internal storage system in no time. With Sony's decision to eliminate physical game discs, the need for a high-speed M.2 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD will be even more important in the future. Juggling a large number of games with just the console's internal storage will be a headache.

Investing in a quality M.2 SSD ensures you do not have to constantly go through the frustration of uninstalling games to make space for new ones or subsequently having to redownload hundreds of gigabytes to replay a previous game. Do not let your console's storage limitations hold you back from playing upcoming AAA releases.

Upgrading your PlayStation 5 with an M.2 SSD is a safe and effective way to expand your storage. It will not void the warranty, provided you use a compatible drive and take care not to damage your console physically during the installation process. Rest assured, as long as you proceed carefully and avoid any accidental damage, your warranty will remain intact. If you have already purchased, or are considering purchasing, an M.2 SSD for your PlayStation 5, let our step-by-step guide take you through every part of the installation process.

Tools Needed To Install a PS5 SSD

• #1 Phillips screwdriver
• PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD with a minimum sequential read of 5,500 MB/s and a built-in or aftermarket heatsink

1. Prepare your PlayStation 5 for installation.

Carefully disconnect both the HDMI and power cables from your PlayStation 5. Detach it from the stand if you are using it. Next, place your console horizontally on a flat surface to make the upgrade process easier and prevent accidental damage.

If you are worried about scratching the console, you can put something like an anti-static mat or a simple piece of cardboard or paper under it. Avoid soft fabrics, such as microfiber cloths or towels, that can generate static electricity when they come into contact with plastic.

2. Remove the cover to get inside the PlayStation 5.

Before you begin working on your PlayStation 5, touch a grounded metal object to discharge any static electricity from your body safely. Then, position your console so the PlayStation logo faces down and the rear ports point directly toward you. Firmly hold the console in place with one hand and, using your other hand, locate the right-bottom corner of the top cover. Gently lift it upward while simultaneously sliding the cover to the left.

For the PlayStation 5 Slim and PlayStation 5 Pro: Similar to the vanilla version, position the console so that the rear ports face toward you, and the larger cover is on your left. Grip the top edge of the smaller cover gently and pull upward until you hear a pop, which signals that the internal clips have released.

3. Remove the metallic cover to access the PlayStation 5's SSD expansion slot.

Using a #1 Phillips screwdriver, carefully remove the screw securing the expansion slot cover on your PlayStation 5. Lift and remove the expansion slot cover to expose the M.2 SSD expansion slot.

4. Prepare for SSD installation.

With the same #1 Phillips screwdriver you used earlier, remove the screw and spacer from the expansion slot. Next, check your SSD to determine its form factor. The PlayStation 5 supports the following M.2 SSD form factors: 2230, 2242, 2260, 2280, and 22110. Relocate the spacer to the correct position in the slot that matches the length of your SSD.

5. Install the M.2 SSD into the expansion slot.

Align the notches on the SSD with the slot in the M.2 connector on your PlayStation 5. Tilt the SSD at a 30-degree angle and gently insert it into the connector. Once the SSD is securely in place, press it down with your thumb. Fasten the drive in place using the screw you previously removed. Do not overtighten the screw as this may damage the drive or the expansion slot.

Sony does not include a heatsink for M.2 SSDs in the PlayStation 5. There are many SSDs with PlayStation 5-compliant heatsinks on the market. Sony specifies a maximum thickness of 0.44 inches (11.25 mm) for the SSD including the heatsink.

However, if you go with a bare M.2 drive, you will have to pick up an aftermarket heatsink, such as the Sabrent M.2 NVMe PS5 Heatsink (SB-PSHS) for $13.99. Before purchasing any heatsink, double-check that it is fully compatible with your PlayStation 5 model.

6. Install an aftermarket heatsink, when applicable, on the SSD.

Tilt the heatsink at a 30-degree angle, just as you did with the SSD, and align the notches on the heatsink with the corresponding space. Insert it into position so that it sits flush over the SSD. Use one finger to apply a little bit of downward pressure to keep the heatsink in contact with the SSD, then tighten the screw. Reinstall the cover, and you are almost home free.

7. Format the SSD.

Reconnect all the cables and power on your console. Upon startup, your PlayStation 5 will automatically detect the new SSD. A prompt will appear on the screen, instructing you to format the SSD before you can use it for game installations or data storage.

With your brand-new SSD installed and properly formatted, you are now ready to enjoy the latest AAA games on your PlayStation 5 without having to worry about storage constraints ever again.

With the ongoing AI boom triggering worldwide memory shortages, getting a good deal on RAM or storage has become increasingly difficult. If you are on the lookout for a snappy SSD, however, we have spotted a solid deal on Newegg that could help you save some money on your next storage upgrade. The Kingston NV3 1TB PCIe Gen 4 SSD is currently selling for $156.99, down from its usual price of $215.99, which is also the lowest price the SSD has seen in the past 30 days.

• Check out the Kingston NV3 on Newegg

The Kingston NV3 was introduced back in late 2024 as a budget PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, with the 1TB model rated for sequential read speeds of up to 6,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 4,000 MB/s. That makes it more than capable of handling everyday office workloads, gaming, and even demanding file transfers. It is notably a DRAM-less SSD as it uses Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology instead, meaning that the performance may vary depending on the workload. It also has a slightly lower than recommended rated endurance of 320TBW along with a five-year limited warranty.

The SSD may not be suitable for heavy workloads or as a primary SSD in a high-end workstation, but in our testing we found that it can still be a sensible choice for secondary storage. In 3DMark's Storage Benchmark, the NV3 delivered respectable results, and it performed well in PCMark 10, where it beat the Corsair MP600 Elite and came reasonably close to several more expensive SSDs. If you're primarily looking for a drive to store games, photos, videos or any other important data, it should be perfectly adequate. It also consumes very little power and runs fairly cool during operations, just 48°C, the maximum recorded temperature on one of its sensors during testing.

The 1TB Kingston NV3 at its discounted price of $156.99 is a solid option if you're looking for an affordable way to expand your PC's storage. It might not be the fastest or the most capable SSD on the market, but at that price we can't really complain.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, gaming chair, or CPU Deals pages.

Perhaps as a result of AI hyperscaler demand soaking up all the cutting-edge flash, external storage makers in recent months have seemed to focus less on speed and more on adding unique and helpful features. We saw this with Sharge's Disk Pro and its built-in hub, Orico's Book Drive P10 Plus and its 100W passthrough charging and MagSafe-compatible back. Adata seems to be playing a similar game with its latest drive, the Urban Tapsafe.

The Urban Tapsafe external SSD is quite compact, about the size of a lighter at 2.70 x 1.42 x 0.76 inches, while making space for a built-in clip, NFC support for automatic locking and unlocking of your data with your phone (if you install the requisite app), and even magnetic swappable front plates. Under the hood, it's a fairly typical 20 Gbps drive with performance that's generally fine. But if you need something small and prefer a clip to a magnet for keeping the drive where you need it, it's worth considering. It also ships with a long five-year warranty, compared to the 2-3 years offered by many other drives in this class.

Specifications

Design and accessories

The Urban Tapsafe stands out in terms of design, in part due to its magnetic face plates that snap onto the frame. The company includes both a black plate and one with a color-shifting surface that looks silver, gray, or a light metallic purple, depending on lighting and the angle you look at it from.

And it's not just about the pretty faceplates. The silver metal chassis feels extremely solid and sports a clip with a strong grip, aided by ridged silicone pads on both sides of the opening. This makes the drive easy to clip onto a pocket, your bag, or video rigs. The limiting factor here is that the clip only opens about half an inch, so it won't clip on to anything bulky.

Despite its plethora of design flourishes and features, the Tapsafe is also pretty small, at 2.3 inches long and 0.72 inches thick. Its metal frame means it's not the lightest drive, at 2.56 ounces, but it's obviously not going to weigh you down.

Putting the tap in Tapsafe, with an app

Of course, the Tapsafe drive's main selling point is the ability to unlock the drive via NFC. This is done via the Urban Tapsafe app, which Adata offers for both Android and iOS. And far from just having simple unlock capabilities, it also lets you give access to multiple users, as well as stipulate whether they are limited to read-only or read-and-write access. The app is fairly simple, but everything worked more or less as expected during my time testing the drive.

After installing and launching the app, you'll first need to use your fingerprint or whatever authentication you use to unlock your phone to get access. Once the app is unlocked, you'll need to hit Add Drive, then you'll be asked to name the drive and create and confirm a password. After hitting Submit, you're asked to make sure the drive is plugged in, then tap the back of your phone to the drive.

This didn't work the first time I tried it with the drive plugged into my Samsung S25 Ultra; I got an error saying the drive didn't have power. But when I plugged the drive into my PC and tapped with my phone, the drive registered, and I was able to use my phone to unlock the SSD. Once the drive and app were configured, I went back and tried unlocking the drive when it was plugged into my phone, and it worked as expected. My phone's USB port is a bit fiddly with power connections, so my initial unlocking issue was likely an a problem with my phone, not the drive.

With the drive set up to use the app and password, it will lock whenever the drive is unplugged. Plug it back in, and the drive won't be recognized by your system. The small drive activity light will glow a steady red until you again open the app on your phone, tap Unlock, and move your phone to the drive. Then the drive should unlock, the activity light will turn blue, and, in Windows, the drive and its content will pop up in an Explorer window.

The app also lets you share access to the drive with up to nine other users, and stipulate whether they will have read and write access to the drive, or just read access. They'll also need to have the app installed, and physical access to the drive, then they scan the QR code supplied by your app to grant access. After this, tapping their phone to the SSD will grant the requisite drive access.

Note that the drive isn't being encrypted or decrypted during this process, and Adata makes no specific claims about hardware security. The drive simply will not function or be recognized over USB without using the app to unlock it (if the NFC/password function is enabled, of course). It's possible that if someone had access to the drive and was able to disassemble it, they could get access to the drive's data without app access or the password. So this drive isn't a good fit for situations that call for hardware encryption or high-level data security.

But for those who just want to keep their files private on a basic level, and / or want a drive that lets them selectively share access with other users, there's a lot to like here. The app is pretty well designed and easy to use. The only issue I had was that my phone would occasionally fail to unlock the drive on my first attempt. But once you get used to where your NFC chip is located on the back of your phone (it's in different places, depending on the make and model), the process quickly becomes easier and fairly intuitive.

Comparison products

With AI demand gobbling up all the good flash and hiking prices on anything new at the same time, it's a tough climate for drives like the Urban Tapsafe. While the Tapsafe drive sells for slightly less directly from Adata, it's $228 for the 1TB model and $411 for the 2TB option we tested at Amazon, as of this writing. Meanwhile, one of the better 20 Gbps drives we've tested, Crucial's X10 (which launched last year, months before parent company Micron killed the consumer Crucial brand), is still available for $238 (1TB) and $368 (2TB). Even tougher if you mostly care about price in the same drive class, Team Group's also 20 GBps PD20 drive sells for just $235 for the 2TB model at Amazon – so you could get double the capacity with Team Group for $7 more.

To be fair to Adata, those two competitors don't have an NFC chip for access, or a clip for attaching it to other things. But as we'll see, at least one of the above drives performs better than the Tapsafe, too.

Storage Testbed

In 2025, we updated our external storage testbed to an AMD Ryzen 7600X-based PC with an Asus ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard, installed in Lian Li’s Lancool 217 case. This was done in part because we needed a system with native USB4 support for upcoming drives (like this one).

All the drives in the charts below have been re-tested on the new X870E system, with the exception of the final Iometer sustained sequential test. That benchmark is less about top speed and more about how long a drive can write before depleting any fast cache onboard. We also updated to CrystalDiskMark 8, rather than the older (and non-comparable) version 7 we used on the previous testbed.

A note on testing, before we jump into the benchmarks: Out of the box, our Adata Urban Tapsafe review unit was oddly inconsistent in benchmarks. Most of the time, its read speed topped out below 1,000 Mb/s, while its write speed was nearly double that. At first I thought there might be an issue with our storage testbed, or the cable. I tried changing both and sometimes the drive would read faster, closer to its expected performance. Then it wouldn't, even when plugged into the same machine with the same cable.

After lots of on-and-off testing, getting inconsistent results that usually didn't match Adata's listed read specs by a long shot, I eventually performed a secure erase on the drive via DiskPart, formatted it, and tried again. Surprisingly, that sorted out the issue, and the drive was finally consistent in both its read and write speeds, matching the drive's sequential ratings. Our testing below reflects the drive's capabilities after that secure erase and reformatting cycle.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices.

The Adata drive doesn't start out our benchmark run looking its best – in fact, it landed dead last here, bested even by 10 Gbps drives like the Crucial X9 Pro and the Sharge Disk Pro, as well as Samsung's T9. Its performance isn't massively behind the competition, but it's an early indication that this isn't the snappiest of performers.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

In this real-world file transfer test, the Adata drive fares significantly better, landing in the middle of our charts in terms of read speeds, at 897 MB/s. And its writes were even more impressive, beating everything in our charts save for the 40 Gbps Corsair external SSD.

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark (CDM) is a free and easy-to-run storage benchmarking tool that SSD companies commonly use to assign product performance specifications. It gives us insight into how each device handles different file sizes. We run this test at its default settings.

Moving back to synthetic tests and this sequential benchmark, the competing 20 Gbps Crucial and Team Group drives did better on reads again. But on writes, only the Crucial and Corsair drives did better here.

In small file performance, we see perhaps an explanation why the drive also didn't do well on PCMark. Its small-file read performance was third-from-last place, while write IOPS trailed everything else by a significant margin. This performance isn't quite damning, but it does mean the Tapsafe isn't the best option if you want to run programs directly from your drive, or use it as a boot drive.

Sustained Write Performance

A drive's rated write specifications are only a piece of the performance picture. Most external SSDs (just like their internal counterparts) implement a write cache, or a fast area of flash, programmed to perform like faster SLC, that absorbs incoming data.

Sustained write speeds often suffer tremendously when the workload saturates the cache and slips into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated.

On this grueling sustained write test, the Adata Urban Tapsafe managed to deliver between 1,800 and 1,900 MB/s for a solid five minutes, before dropping to about 250 MB/s, and then dropping again near the end of our 15-minute test to below 70 MB/s. While its speed past about the 14-minute mark is abysmally slow (less than a laptop hard drive), the Tapsafe's showing here is easily better than the competing Team Group drive, which started slower and fell faster. Crucial's X10 is a better option on this sustained test, as is Corsair's USB4 drive (which is of course significantly more expensive). But so long as you aren't expecting a 20 Gbps drive with pro-level write performance, the Tapsafe is speedy and consistent enough to keep most users happy.

Bottom Line

Adata's Urban Tapsafe is a unique drive that's well-suited to those who want basic, convenient control over who has access to the data on their drive, and who want to share that access with a handful of other users who also have physical access to the drive. Its tap-to-unlock, NFC-based access might not be technically as secure as more traditional AES-based encryption, but it worked well during our testing. And the ability to selectively give read or read / write access to up to nine other people via their own phones and apps could make this drive a good fit for collaborative projects or family file storage.

In terms of performance, it's not the fastest 20 Gbps drive, but it's also far from the slowest. For mainstream tasks like video recording or moving large files quickly, its performance is more than speedy enough — just make sure your devices have a 20 Gbps port if you want the fastest possible speeds.

As a niche device for those cases where you need the drive's NFC unlocking and multi-user sharing, the Urban Tapsafe is easy to recommend. But its high price means it's likely to remain a niche, because Team Group's PD20 performs nearly as well (barring sustained writes) while costing much less. And Crucial's X10 drive is a significantly faster 20 Gbps alternative that sells for a little more at the 1TB capacity, and is about $30 cheaper than the Tapsafe at its top 2TB tier.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

While SSD pricing isn't quite as bad as RAM, buying more storage for your PC is tough these days. Samsung recently released a new 'budget' version of its 990 M.2 SSD, and it just got a decent discount at Amazon. The 990 2 TB SSD is now $339 instead of $529, a 36% saving.

● Grab this deal at Amazon

The 990 SSD is an interesting product because it is one of the few SSDs released after the AI pricing crunch sent storage prices into orbit. As such, we know what Samsung thinks this drive is worth in the current climate, namely $529. While 2TB of storage would have been much cheaper a year ago, a 36% discount on a new SSD is not to be sniffed at, especially given all signs point to these drives getting more expensive, not cheaper, in the future.

We reviewed this drive at launch last month and liked its full-fledged Gen 4 throughput, decent power consumption, and good all-around performance. The 990 is essentially a QLC-based 990 EVO Plus, featuring Samsung's PiccoloQ controller and V9 QLC Flash memory.

As you can see from our testing data, it scores very close to the 990 EVO Plus in latency testing, while beating the 990 Evo drive in bandwidth and 3DMark overall score.

This drive also scored well in our PS5 test, so this drive could serve as an expansion drive for your PlayStation if you so choose. At its list price, this drive makes no sense as a purchase up against the 990 Pro or Samsung's Gen 5 9100, but at this price it is a good chunk cheaper than both of those options. Amazon does have a 39% discount on the 990 Pro 2TB, now $389 instead of $639 if you want to spend a bit more on that slightly more performant drive. Or, if your motherboard supports Gen 5, you might want to eat the $60 jump for the 9100 Pro 2TB, currently $399 at Amazon. This regular 990 also has a 1TB model on sale, but that discount is just 13%, so its $199.99 price tag makes it poorer value compared to the 2TB model.

As always with storage deals, these prices are tough to stomach, but they aren't going to improve any time soon. In fact, all signs point to the AI pricing crunch continuing to make things worse going forward, meaning leaving it too long could make storage even more expensive in the future.

OXMIQ Labs, a GPU IP company, revealed at Hot Chips 2026 that High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) cannot replace High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) across the vast majority of workloads. For some, HBF could emerge as a specialized memory tier for huge but relatively cold datasets. For others, HBF can do more harm than good.

When SanDisk unveiled its High-Bandwidth Flash (HBF) concept in early 2025, the technology pledged to equip AI accelerators with terabytes of relatively inexpensive memory and reduce the need for traditional High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM), a promise that raised a number of doubts from the very beginning.

The emerging HBF specification includes three performance grades. Grade 1 uses an 8-Hi 256GB NAND stack with an 8 GT/s UCIe interface and 384 GB/s bandwidth. Grade 2 uses a 512GB NAND stack with a 16 GT/s UCIe interface and supports 1.536 TB/s bandwidth. Grade 3 reaches 3.072 TB/s using 32 GT/s UCIe 2.0 while retaining the same 512 GB capacity.

Since HBF relies on 3D NAND, it supports read block sizes between 64 bytes and 4 kilobytes, 4KB writes, and 4KB page sizes. While HBF Grade 1 can barely compete against contemporary HBM, HBF Grade 3 can compete against HBM4E, though we have no idea when such memory will be available. However, the main feature of HBF is not necessarily performance per se, but 8 – 16 times more capacity than HBM at roughly the same cost.

Indeed, OXMIQ believes that HBF should be viewed as a high-capacity memory technology rather than inexpensive HBM. Memory economics depend not only on how many gigabytes an application needs to store, but also on how quickly those bytes must be delivered to the processor. As bandwidth demand rises, adding inexpensive but relatively slow HBF eventually becomes less economical than using HBM, according to estimates by OXMIQ.

Cheap memory =/= cheap tokens

OXMIQ demonstrated the trade-off by modeling a 72-GPU rack running the 1-trillion-parameter Kimi-K2 model at FP4. At cost and power parity, an HBM-only configuration provides 20.7 TB of memory and 1,584 TB/s of aggregate bandwidth. Replacing HBM with HBF increases rack capacity by 14 times to a whopping 294.9 TB, but reduces aggregate bandwidth to 922 TB/s. A hybrid configuration with HBM and HBF provides 89.3 TB and between 279 TB/s and 1,418 TB/s, depending on workload conditions. The difference between HBM and HBF bandwidth is the reason why HBF looks excellent when memory capacity limits the system. However, HBF eventually loses when bandwidth/throughput becomes the limiting factor.

In OXMIQ's model, an HBF-only configuration enables each GPU to hold its own Kimi-K2 instance and run 72 model instances per rack. Whereas an HBM-only configuration requires eight GPUs to hold each model instance (meaning compute performance gets wasted) and can therefore run only nine instances per rack. This makes HBF particularly attractive when memory capacity determines the number of GPUs required. However, as the number of simultaneous users and their token-generation rate increase, HBF's lower bandwidth becomes the bottleneck, while the HBM-based rack can make better use of its substantially higher memory bandwidth and ultimately deliver lower cost per token, according to OXMIQ's model.

As a result, HBF can dramatically reduce the number of GPUs needed simply to accommodate a very large model (i.e., enable one HBF-equipped GPU to do the capacity job of eight HBM-equipped GPUs). Nonetheless, if the objective is maximum inference throughput from a fully utilized rack, HBM may remain the better, more economical choice. At the end of the presentation, OXMIQ concludes: 'HBM for the rack, HBF for the box.'

Niche memory?

Although HBF does not benefit all AI workloads and may even harm the performance of many, there are applications that can benefit from a surplus of local memory.

Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models appear to be particularly suitable for HBF. OXMIQ's Kimi-K3 example has 1.56 TB of weights, of which 1.45 TB, or 93%, consists of MoE expert weights. Since only selected experts are activated for each token, this enormous pool is largely write-once and relatively infrequently read. OXMIQ proposes keeping such experts in HBF while placing the remaining, frequently accessed weights in HBM.

Additionally, more local capacity could also reduce communication between accelerators. Conventional expert parallelism distributes experts across GPUs and requires all-to-all communication at every layer. OXMIQ claims that inexpensive HBF capacity could allow considerably more experts to reside locally, reduce the number of expert-parallel shards, and reduce network traffic. In this case, HBF effectively trades memory capacity for interconnect bandwidth and power consumption.

Long-context inference is another potential use case. Sparse-attention models access only a small portion of their large KV cache during each decoding step, which allows the rest to remain in slower HBF memory. OXMIQ believes that HBF could store this large KV cache while the accelerator fetches only the data needed for each step from HBF to HBM.

The HBM-as-cache idea has a serious limitation. Intuitively, one would put popular experts in HBM and cold experts in HBF. Such a strategy works mainly at low batch sizes or when similar queries can be deliberately batched. As batch size rises and queries become more heterogeneous, however, expert popularity flattens, and the workload accesses a broader range of experts, according to OXMIQ. The working set can then outgrow the relatively small HBM cache, which results in more frequent expert transfers from HBF and reduces the performance benefit provided by HBM caching.

The hardest part

OXMIQ does not expect HBF to work simply as slower GPU memory. Instead, it proposes using HBF in place of host DRAM to store large amounts of less frequently accessed data, such as MoE experts and KV cache. Frequently used data would remain in HBM, while even colder data could still be kept in remote memory or SSDs. This certainly contradicts SanDisk's original vision for HBF: sitting next to AI accelerators. Furthermore, adding HBF support will be complicated on many levels.

The software side of HBF is particularly complicated. To achieve maximum bandwidth, HBF requires large transfers — 64 KB reads and 1 MB writes — and data is moved through DMA rather than the CPU/GPU cache hierarchy. When HBF and HBM are used together, software must also decide which data goes into each memory type and manage HBF's limited write endurance.

Meanwhile, current inference software is not ready for such a configuration. OXMIQ says vLLM would need dedicated HBF support to manage memory allocation and data placement, prefetch data before it is needed, and monitor flash endurance, which requires a major software overhaul. An effort like this has to be a joint effort between the HBF hardware vendors, AI accelerator vendors, and inference-framework developers.

At the lowest level, AMD, Nvidia, and other accelerator vendors would need to provide the hardware/driver/runtime mechanisms for efficiently moving data between HBF and HBM. Then vLLM developers, who work with vendors, would implement the higher-level memory allocator and policies that decide which experts/KV blocks live in HBM and which reside in HBF, when they should move, and how to hide HBF latency.

On the one hand, if AMD or Nvidia adopt HBF, they will provide its partners with everything needed to use it, and while this would take time before everything works as intended, this is a straightforward way to add HBF support to AI platforms. On the other hand, the biggest question is whether hardware vendors like AMD or Nvidia need HBF. As per OXMIQ, HBF's advantage is limited to select use cases, so it may not make sense for AMD or Nvidia to support it universally, especially keeping in mind that managing multi-tier memory hierarchy is hard.

SambaNova is perhaps the most obvious candidate to support HBF. Its SN40L already uses a three-tier hierarchy: SRAM => HBM => DDR, with up to 520MB of SRAM, 64GB HBM, and 1.5 TB of DDR. Conceptually, HBF could become another tier or replace some of that DDR capacity. Then again, this is merely speculation.

HBF remains a nascent technology

While we still have a lot to learn about how HBF works, OXMIQ's model suggests that HBF has a much weaker general-purpose value proposition than the original claim made in early 2025 suggested. It is not useless: it is a specialized solution whose strongest applications depend on particular workload characteristics.

The fundamental problem is that HBF solves memory capacity, while modern AI accelerators are frequently constrained by memory bandwidth. OXMIQ's simulation makes this rather obvious: HBF provides about 14X more memory capacity but only 0.6X the aggregate bandwidth of HBM. Once the workload becomes sufficiently bandwidth-intensive, the enormous capacity stops offsetting the bandwidth deficit.

While the hybrid HBM+HBF solution makes sense for some use cases, it is not a magic fix. When HBM is used as an expert cache, heterogeneous requests at larger batch sizes flatten expert popularity, cause the workload to touch more experts, and reduce cache efficiency dramatically.

For now, HBF has three particularly compelling use cases: reduce the number of GPUs required simply to fit huge models, store massive but infrequently accessed MoE expert pools, and keep large KV caches for sparse long-context inference. For MoE models, its large local capacity could also reduce expert parallelism and expensive all-to-all communication between GPUs. In all three cases, HBF makes sense because capacity requirements are enormous while bandwidth demand remains relatively low.

Memory and data storage manufacturer Micron announced its exit from the consumer market earlier this year and pledged to honor warranties for existing products. However, according to a recent RMA case on Reddit, the company seems to be struggling to stick to that promise. Instead of replacing a faulty portable SSD, the company offered the customer a refund that was significantly lower than the product’s current retail price.

Explaining their frustrating RMA experience, u/CarefulMeasurement99 said that their Crucial X9 4TB portable SSD stopped working, after which they contacted support, followed the troubleshooting process, and had their RMA approved. Unfortunately, they were later informed that the company did not have any units available for the particular product because the replacement inventory was exhausted. Therefore, instead of providing a 1:1 replacement SSD, the company would issue a refund of $199.99, the same as the original invoice price from last year.

Due to the ongoing NAND and DRAM crisis, almost every memory and storage product has significantly gone up in price. The Crucial X9 4TB is currently priced at over $500 on Amazon, which basically left the customer facing a loss of nearly $300. The customer explicitly refused to accept the offer and told Micron support that they did not want a refund and requested a 1:1 replacement under warranty. They also offered to accept an alternative 4TB SSD model or wait indefinitely until the RMA inventory was restocked.

After a long ordeal, pushing back eventually paid off for the customer. They sent Micron a firm final email rejecting the refund and demanding a 4TB equivalent replacement or alternative. The customer also mentioned that the case was gaining traction on Reddit and pointed out potential action under the FTC and Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act. Within a few hours, the case was escalated to a different representative, who informed them that a “recent inventory update” had revealed limited replacement stock and approved a direct 1:1 replacement.

While the case raises questions about Micron’s initial claim of no replacement units being available, there is no way to independently verify that. That said, this does not appear to be an isolated case. Earlier this month, we reported a similar RMA horror story in which Micron offered a customer a refund instead of replacing their product due to a lack of inventory. Only after further communication did Micron provide an acceptable solution.

An alternative storage solution for the Xbox Series X|S finally arrived on the market five years after its launch. The SanDisk Optimus GX C50 starts at 1TB on Amazon and costs $249.99, while the 2TB version will set you back $486.99. SanDisk initially announced the Optimus SSD lineup in early January 2026, but it only revealed this storage solution for the Xbox Series X|S in August of this year. These drives are also listed at a discount directly on the SanDisk website, with the 512GB available for just $109.99, and the 1TB and 2TB versions priced at $199.99 and $339.99, respectively. However, they’re all listed as unavailable at the time of writing, meaning you’ll have to be patient and click on ‘Notify Me’ to get informed once stock becomes available.

• Get the SanDisk Optimus GX C50 Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S on Amazon.

Seagate was the only brand to offer a storage expansion card for the Xbox Series X|S at launch, with the Seagate Storage Expansion Card for Xbox Series X|S, initially available at a 1TB capacity with an SRP of $199.99. Unfortunately, the AI-driven memory and storage chip shortage has caused NAND prices to balloon, meaning the cheapest brand-new options from third-party sellers on Amazon now start at $318. The brand followed this up with 2TB and 4TB options, with an SRP of $299.99 and $549.99, respectively, but Amazon pricing has brought the former up to $473.99 while the latter remains unavailable.

The Xbox Series X|S launched in 2020, meaning it has been more than six years since these consoles arrived on the market. Despite that, Seagate and SanDisk are your only options if you want to play games directly off the add-on storage slot. Western Digital also used to make these add-on cards for the Xbox, but its decision to focus on HDDs and the spinoff of SanDisk as a separate entity meant that gamers can no longer buy WD storage expansion cards.

These specialized storage expansion cards are only needed if you want to increase the capacity of your console to install more games directly on it. You can still keep your games offloaded on an external hard drive and just plug it into the console when you want to play it again. Crucially, you'll have to move the games from your hard drive back to your Xbox's SSD to ensure the games run properly, which is why these expansion cards are a popular alternative.

This is a different take from Sony’s PS5, which comes with an NVMe slot right on the console. This means that you don’t have to buy proprietary PlayStation SSDs to upgrade the capacity of the console — any PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD would work, making capacity upgrades cheaper. The Nintendo Switch 2 took a similar approach, where it allowed users to upgrade the capacity of their handhelds with a microSD Express slot. It must be noted that microSD Express cards are quite niche, though, and more expensive than ordinary microSD cards, but they could potentially be used on other devices that have a similar slot, making them far more useful compared to the Xbox Series X|S expansion cards, which only work with the particular consoles.

Sandisk has launched the NAS 600 SATA and NAS 800 NVMe series of drives to compete with the best SSDs on the market. However, as their names insinuate, these SSDs target a specific niche: NAS devices. The Sandisk NAS 800 7.68TB, the highest-capacity drive of the lot, flaunting an endurance of 14 PBW, will retail for a whopping $2,199.99.

Despite the fact that we are in the middle of a global storage shortage, Sandisk has remained one of the busiest companies in the storage industry. Having previously released the Sandisk 320 and 520 SATA SSDs, the company is back again with two new SSD lineups. The NAS 600, which sticks to the conventional 2.5-inch form factor, and the NAS 800, which uses the M.2 2280 form factor, target prosumers, professionals, and businesses that need an SSD for their NAS devices.

NAS users typically rely on hard drives because of their affordability and high storage capacity. However, SSDs are a valid alternative to traditional mechanical drives, offering higher transfer throughput. Sometimes, users deploy SSDs as performance accelerators alongside hard drives. But since NAS devices operate 24/7 and are constantly writing lots of data to the drives, you need SSDs with high endurance, and that is where the Sandisk NAS 600 and NAS 800 come in.

The Sandisk NAS 800 boasts some of the highest endurance ratings ever seen on a NAS SSD. According to Sandisk, the drive is officially rated for 14 petabytes written (PBW) over its lifespan. Under a five-year warranty, users can write up to 7.67TB of data to the drive each day. It translates to an impressive 1 Drive Write Per Day (DWPD), meaning users can fill and rewrite the drive’s entire capacity daily for five consecutive years.

Sandisk NAS 600 and NAS 800 Specifications

To put these endurance numbers into perspective, consumer SSDs typically top out around 2,500 TBW, while NAS SSDs sometimes hit 5,000 TBW. The Sandisk NAS 800's impressive endurance numbers put the drive in the same category as enterprise SSDs with crazy endurance ratings over 10,000 TBW. For comparison, the Seagate IronWolf 525, which may be a bit outdated, tops out at 2,800 TBW for its 2TB capacity. In contrast, the comparable Sandisk NAS 800 1.92TB SKU boasts a remarkable 3,500 TBW, representing a 25% higher endurance.

We reached out to Sandisk to inquire about the SSD controller and NAND used in the new NAS 600 and NAS 800 SSDs. While Sandisk has not gotten back to us, we have a fairly good idea of how the company achieved the impressive endurance figures.

Assuming the standard 8TiB of physical NAND behind the 7.68TB user capacity, effective Over-Provisioning (OP) works out to roughly 14.5%, significantly higher than roughly 7% to 10% inherent in consumer drives. Assuming the SSDs use Sandisk 3D TLC NAND with ratings around 1,800 to 2,000 Program/Erase (P/E) cycles, the math implies a Write Amplification Factor (WAF) near 1.16X. However, if the NAND is closer to 3,000 PEC, the rating carries proportionally more margin.

Outside of impressive endurance, the Sandisk NAS 600 and NAS 800 deliver performance that you would expect from SATA III and PCIe 4.0 drives. The former offers sequential read and write speeds up to 560 MB/s and 520 MB/s, respectively, whereas the latter maxes out at 14,900 MB/s and 13,2000 MB/s, respectively. We suspect Sandisk has optimized the firmware for NAS workloads.

Sandisk's new SSDs will not come cheap, as expected for any SSD launched during a storage shortage. The NAS 600 starts at $179.99 for the 500GB but quickly scales to $999.99 for the 4TB SKU. Meanwhile, the NAS 800 960GB and 7.68TB will cost $309.99 and $2,199.99, respectively. Both series come with a limited five-year warranty and will be available for purchase in September.

A 30TB TLC enterprise SSD now costs $22,600, 6.5 times higher than the $3,460 it fetched around this time last year, and an equivalent hard drive costs $1,216, putting flash at 18.6 times the price of disk per terabyte. On those numbers, a 25PB AI storage build comes to $51.60 million all-flash against $12.86 million as a hybrid SSD-plus-HDD system. The figures come from the August update to VDURA's Flash Volatility Index, published by a vendor that sells exactly that kind of hybrid system, and they record a further 5% flash price rise in July with the TLC-to-HDD multiple easing from a 23.2 times peak in Q1.

The hybrid option only works if you can buy the hard drives, though, and Seagate and Western Digital have both told investors their nearline HDD output is sold out through 2027. Anyone without a long-term supply contract is paying spot prices for the disk, not the $1,216 in VDURA's table.

TrendForce’s Q3 survey has NAND contract prices rising 10–15% quarter on quarter, after 70-75% in Q2 and a 55–60% Q1 that saw enterprise SSD contract prices climb roughly 80% in a single quarter. VDURA's 5% figure sits inside that decelerating range, but the company reads it differently: Erik Salo, senior vice president of marketing and business operations, said in the release that "elevated flash pricing is structural."

The June update to the same index had already raised VDURA's Q1 2026 TLC figure from the $10,950 published in January to $17,500, so the company has already changed its own historical numbers once since the index launched.

VDURA also has the 30TB HDD rising from $495 in Q3 2025 to $1,216 now, a 2.5 times increase. Western Digital CEO Irving Tan told analysts in February that the company was sold out for 2026, with firm purchase orders from its top seven customers and agreements with three of its top five running into 2027 and 2028.

Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said on the company's April earnings call that nearline capacity was almost fully allocated through calendar 2027 under build-to-order contracts. Rosenblatt Securities analyst Sajal Dogra put the HDD spot premium at 30% to 40% in an August note ahead of WD's results. VDURA's mixed-fleet configuration pairs 5.78PB of flash with 22.68PB of hard drives, or roughly 756 30TB units at index pricing. A neocloud without a hyperscaler-scale supply agreement is buying those drives at spot, if at all, which moves the $12.86 million figure in only one direction: up

VDURA launched the index in January alongside a Storage Economics Optimizer Tool that models cost for the mixed-fleet architecture it sells. The broad direction matches independent data and our own retail tracking, which shows consumer SSD prices up as much as 220% over the same period. The 18.6 times multiple itself, though, sets one vendor's unexplained flash price sample against a hard drive price that neither Seagate nor WD is offering to new customers

Although SK hynix is primarily known as a memory maker, the South Korean company also produces high-quality consumer SSDs, many of which previously earned spots on our list of the best SSDs. Recently, a Reddit user said they reached out to SK hynix for a warranty replacement on a malfunctioning SSD, but the chipmaker reportedly told the owner no replacement units were available and instead offered a refund at the original purchase price. However, with SSD prices soaring due to a global storage shortage, a refund like this would be insufficient to buy a comparable drive in today’s market.

When you send in an SSD for warranty work, there are generally two possible outcomes. Either the company repairs it or replaces it with a similar or equivalent drive, or, in some cases, provides a refund. The former is often straightforward; the latter, however, tends to be more complex. The manufacturer's warranty strictly defines the refund amount.

If you examine SK hynix’s warranty policy on SSDs, the documentation explicitly states: “In lieu of a Product repair or replacement, the original purchaser may receive a refund of either the original purchase price or the fair market value, whichever is lower.”

In other words, SK hynix will determine the refund amount by comparing what the Redditor paid for the SSD at the time of purchase with its current fair market value, then issuing the lower figure. Under normal market conditions, it would be a fair and reasonable solution. However, the storage shortage has caused SSD prices to increase substantially, so this clause will definitely leave customers at a disadvantage. The Redditor did not provide details on which drive they bought or when. Nonetheless, as examples, SSDs like the SK hynix Platinum P51 and its predecessor, the Platinum P41, have doubled in price since the storage shortage.

An increasing number of warranty claims have gone public over the last couple of months. For example, a recent incident involving Micron saw the company initially offering only a standard refund at the original purchase price for a Crucial memory kit, the company's axed consumer brand. After some pushback, Micron ultimately offered to match the memory kit's capacity with alternative memory modules.

In another high-profile spat, Louis Rossmann had a lengthy back-and-forth with Samsung customer service over an SSD warranty and eventually threatened legal action. Samsung ultimately refunded the owner at the SSD's current market price. It was weird to see the situation escalate the way it did since Samsung’s warranty policy confirms that if the company is unable to repair or replace a product, it will “refund the then current market value of the Product at the time the warranty claim is made to Samsung.”

Recent cases show that it is important for consumers to read the fine print in manufacturers' warranty policies, especially in these turbulent times. Many companies are profiting immensely from the memory and storage shortage. Nevertheless, they should not forget the customers who supported them before the shortage. Consumers are already frustrated by rising hardware prices, so manufacturers should at least show empathy and flexibility when handling warranty claims to better serve their customers.

Unfortunately, storage costs for PC builders have shot up into the stratosphere this year. AI has sucked up our RAM and SSDs and left us with inflated prices as a result, making it essential to find good deals in the current market when they appear. This 4TB Team Group T-Force G50 SSD for $389.99, thanks to a $106 discount code at Newegg, isn't a record breaker, but it's basically the lowest price you'll pay for this amount of storage for an SSD offering Gen 4 speeds, and $10 cheaper than we saw during Prime Day.

● Check out this deal at Newegg

The only drive you'll find cheaper with similar specs is the Silicon Power UD90, but only by a few cents, with the next drive costing you over $50 more for slower speeds. If you want it, you'll need to make sure you use the coupon code BTSF2997 at checkout to get the full discount applied.

The T-Force G50 is a PCIe 4.0 SSD, running over all four lanes, and offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 5,000 and 4,500 MB/s apiece. It won't be winning any speed awards, but if that was your aim, then the Samsung 990 Pro, which sits on our best SSD, is the better option. You'll need to pay almost twice the price, however, with the 990 Pro costing $789.99 right now, just $10 less than double what you're paying here for the same storage capacity.

The T-Force G50 comes with a graphene heatsink to keep things cool, ships with TLC memory, and features a memory controller from InnoGrit.

The $389.99 sale price for this Team Group T-Force G50 4TB SSD is a bargain under current conditions. We're in a troubled market for PC builders, and the $106 saving brings this SSD down to around 10.2 cents per GB, as low as you'll find right now for this capacity from a Gen 4 SSD. Don't forget to use coupon code BTSF2997 for the discount, however.

SK hynix has resumed investments in its fab in Dalian, China, which is operated by its Solidigm subsidiary, and plans to boost its output by 50% already in 2027, reports Sedaily. Coincidentally, the company is mulling listing some of Solidigm's shares on NASDAQ to raise capital, but to retain control over its North America-based subsidiary, according to The Korea Herald.

After SK hynix acquired Intel's 3D NAND and SSD business in 2021 and formed its Solidigm subsidiary shortly after, it suspended any expansions of Solidigm's capacity in China partly due to the memory market downturn in 2022 – 2023 and partly due to U.S. export controls that curb exports of advanced fab tools to China. However, as demand for solid-state storage is setting records in general and demand for Solidigm's high-capacity SSDs is exceptionally strong, SK hynix is reconsidering its capacity plans for the Dalian fab just in time for Solidigm's initial public offering.

Following a four-year pause, Solidigm has reportedly resumed investment in its Dalian facility in China this year. The company has completed construction of the second phase of the fab and is preparing to start installing production equipment as early as November, the report claims. The facility is expected to begin mass production of floating gate 3D NAND flash in the first half of 2027, if the report is accurate.

The second phase of Solidigm's fab in Dalian is reportedly designed for a wafer output capacity of around 50,000 wafer starts per month (WSPM). Combined with approximately 100,000 WSPM at the existing first phase of the facility, the new phase would boost Solidigm's NAND production capacity in Dalian by roughly 50%, to around 150,000 WSPM.

Late last year, the U.S. government granted SK hynix and Samsung annual licenses to ship semiconductor production equipment that contains technologies developed in America to their Chinese fabs through 2026, which replaced their previous open-ended Validated End User (VEU) exemptions. As a result, both companies can now upgrade their fabs in the People's Republic and even use new process technologies there.

Solidigm, for example, intends to start making floating gate 3D QLC NAND memory with over 200 active layers at its Dalian facility in the second half of 2026, which was made possible by the timely tool upgrades. The additional capacity will further increase bit output of the Dalian campus, which in turn will enable Solidigm to produce its 245TB-class SSDs due to be introduced in the coming months in decent quantities, sometimes in 2027.

Solidigm, which controls roughly a quarter of the data center-grade SSD market, is a crown jewel in SK hynix's portfolio as it makes unique products that are sold at a premium and are in high demand. Listing Solidigm on NASDAQ would enable SK hynix to gain capital (up to $7 billion, if unofficial reports are correct), but retain control over the precious asset. The money that SK hynix will raise should be roughly enough to expand Solidigm's capacity and increase output of premium data center-grade solid-state drives.

It should be noted that SK hynix did not officially confirm the Solidigm IPO plan last week, as its regulatory filing on August 5 said that Solidigm was considering various ways to improve its competitiveness, but the final decision is yet to be made.

If you need to buy new storage for your PC, you're going to pay extra. There's no way around that fact. The AI boom has forced prices up across the board. Without a time machine, the only way to score a good deal on a new SSD is to find a bargain that is hundreds of dollars cheaper than its current list price. Luckily, this 4TB Samsung 9910 Pro deal at Woot qualifies, knocking a huge $348 off compared to sister brand Amazon's rival discount price, making it $619.99 for a limited time only.

● Check out this deal at Woot

Before you grab your pitchforks, this is a good deal in context. Amazon owns Woot, so it's fair to use Amazon's own historic pricing as a benchmark here. That data shows this SSD, like the entire market, has seen a huge set of price increases since December. We've not seen this particular model close to this price since February. Prices have been unstoppable since then, too.

For your money, you're getting 4TB of fast storage from a known, trusted brand. Our Samsung 9910 Pro review, made before the market turmoil, shows this is a good all-rounder drive, with good power efficiency compared to its rivals. This is a PCIe 5.0 SSD, with speeds that vastly improve upon rival Gen 4 and 3 drives, and will be a huge step up over an older SATA SSD or traditional hard drive.

Two things are important to point out on this SSD: speed and capacity. 4TB of storage is a sizable amount for a gaming or productivity rig. Once you've installed your operating system, you'll be left with terabytes of space for your files. If you're a gamer, that'll mean enough for several of the biggest AAA game installations, alongside plenty of indies, with enough room left spare.

Speed is arguably the bigger draw, though. The Samsung 9910 Pro is an NVMe M.2 SSD, running on PCIe 5.0 over four lanes, delivering sequential read and write speeds of 14,800 MB/s and 13,400 MB/s apiece. This isn't the fastest, but it's not a million miles away from faster rivals like the Corsair MP700 Pro XT, which leads our best SSD list for speed with speeds of 14, 900 MB/s and 14,700 MB/s for read and write.

Specs-wise, the 9100 Pro is built with a single-sided design that includes an SSD controller, a DRAM package, and two NAND flash packages. It's made with Samsung's 5nm Presto controller and is able to max out PCIe 5.0 over four lanes for best throughput. It's a TLC drive using Samsung's 236-layer V8 flash memory modules. This particular 4TB model comes with a heatsink, too, to help keep the drive cool during use.

The $619.99 sale price for this 4TB Samsung 9910 Pro is not ground-breaking or an all-time low. In the context of the current PC hardware market, however, it's a good price that knocks nearly $350 off compared to the same model on sale at Amazon. It's a Prime exclusive (Woot is owned by Amazon), so if you want it, you'll need to make sure you use a Woot account that's linked to your existing Amazon Prime account.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

Sandisk arrives running hot to the M.2 2230 SSD segment. A spiritual successor to the popular WD Black SN770M, the Optimus GX 7100M invokes memories of the laptop champion WD Black SN7100 with tested and true hardware. Does the class-leading responsiveness and power efficiency carry over to the smaller factor? Portable gaming system owners can rest easy knowing that it does.

We don’t want to confuse WD and Sandisk here, even if the hardware – and software, for that matter – is similar and often shared. Sandisk is making its own mark, and the Optimus GX 7100M, or 7100M for short, is proof of that. While there were few options available in the M.2 2230 form factor when the Steam Deck launched, there would soon be almost too many. Sandisk didn’t have to release this drive, but we’re glad it did, because it does fill an important hole in the lineup where alternatives have become harder to find.

This is a high-end Gen 4 drive, or as high-end as this segment gets. It’s still DRAM-less but can push the full bandwidth of the interface at both capacities. Where it shines is in its random read performance. That’s the key metric for responsiveness or real-world feel, and especially for game-focused hardware, it means the fastest loading times possible. Portable systems also need to use as little power as possible to reduce heat generation and prolong battery life. The 7100M’s pedigree is great there, too. And while 2TB was once hard to find in this form factor, because drives need to be single-sided with just one NAND flash package, the 7100M handles that and does it with faster TLC rather than lower-endurance QLC flash.

It’s a powerhouse of a product. The reason we say it fills a hole is that the alternatives are hard to find. The Crucial P310 still tends to be a great choice, but the parent company is moving away from the retail space due to AI and enterprise demand. The P310 is also QLC-based, which, while not a big deal anymore, does limit its performance in some cases and means reduced endurance. TLC-based alternatives with Phison’s E27T controller, like the Corsair MP600 Mini, are harder to find and don’t quite match that random read performance. SMI’s competing controller is more often used in budget products, where you can find it, like the Kingston NV3. The 7100M is left as the clear winner if you want the very best – especially if you like its strong software package – with no real drawbacks.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Specifications

M.2 2230 SSDs are generally limited to a small range of capacities, and the Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M is no different. Lower capacities don’t make sense for an upgrade when base models typically come with at least 512GB of storage. Larger capacities, 4TB or more, are difficult to achieve in such a small form factor. The 7100M only being available at 1TB and 2TB, therefore, makes sense. We will add that 4TB is possible with slightly longer M.2 2242 SSDs like the Corsair MP700 Micro and, also, 4TB for 2230 will be possible in the future. Furthermore, if devices were designed for double-sided drives, then all these limits would be effectively doubled. From the other side of things, rising memory and storage costs mean that base units might arrive with less storage, making smaller drives relevant again. It’s a push-pull situation.

At the time of review, the 1TB was going for $229.99 and the 2TB for $449.99. At 1TB, you could get the P310 for a little bit less, but otherwise, you will be giving up performance to save money. Considering the P310 is QLC-based, the 7100M isn’t too badly priced there. At 2TB, the price gap is more significant, as you can get slower alternatives for $50 to $150 less. Unfortunately, maximum performance at 2TB is the holy grail, so paying the premium could be worth it. Right now, it’s $50 or 12.5% over the last-generation WD Black SN770M, for instance, and on paper, that sounds reasonable for a drive that’s faster and more efficient.

Both capacities of the 7100M have the same peak performance level: up to 7,250 / 6,900 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,000K / 1,300K random read and write IOPS. Both sets of numbers are excellent for a drive in this form factor, and the drive even exceeds what the Phison E27T-based Corsair MP600 Mini can achieve. This is top-tier performance for this segment and a full notch above the WD Black SN770M and effectively matches the 7100M’s forebear, the WD Black SN7100. While the Black SN7100 did not particularly stand out for us with its performance, its power efficiency is fantastic. That bodes well for the 7100M.

SanDisk has the drive pulling 4W or less under typical workloads, which puts the drive into a good spot for mobile devices. We test with a mixed workload, which can push a drive a little bit harder than this. Either way, this isn’t a lot of power for a full-fledged Gen 4 device – the drive’s 7,250 MB/s is near the limits of the interface – so we can expect good power efficiency.

Sandisk backs the drive with the standard 5-year, 600TB of writes per TB warranty. The drive supports the TCG Pyrite 2.01 specification and only has software encryption. This is perfectly normal for a drive of this type. The TBW is, however, higher with TLC versus QLC flash.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Software and Accessories

Sandisk has you covered with its software. The Sandisk Desktop App, which works on Windows and macOS, is useful for general file transfer and password protection – software encryption, as well. The Sandisk Dashboard is Sandisk’s take on WD’s Dashboard, an SSD toolbox application with a wide range of features. An SSD toolbox like this gives you information on your system and drives, including SMART and health information. It lets you test and benchmark the drive. Importantly, this software also helps you update the firmware, if necessary, and use other features such as Game Mode. Sandisk also offers an Acronis True Image download, which is great for backing up files and your OS or for cloning drives.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M: A Closer Look

The 2TB Optimus GX 7100M is a single-sided drive, optimized for device compatibility. This does limit it to a single NAND flash package, which puts a cap at 2TB. This is because the most common dies widely available are 1Tb, or 128GB, apiece, and typically a single package – which has to stack the dies on top of each other, might have dummy dies for stability, and has to carefully maintain signal quality without exceeding height limitations – can only hit sixteen dies.

According to the specification sheet, this drive uses the M.2 2230-S3-M form factor. The M.2 format is easily recognizable as the way consumer SSDs are made these days, in contrast to the old 2.5” SATA drives. Other form factors meet the needs of the enterprise. 2230 tells us the length and width in millimeters. This is a common size for portable devices like the Steam Deck, the Asus ROG Ally, and the Lenovo Legion Go. The “M” part means it’s M-key, which we expect these days as NVMe drives using a full four lanes are common. Some drives can drop back to two lanes, like the Samsung 990 EVO and Samsung 990 EVO Plus, but are still capable of using four.

The “S3” is the part we’re looking for here, which tells us it’s single-sided rather than double-sided with a “D.” The number tells us the permitted height of the components. S1 allows for 1.2mm, S2 1.35mm, and S3 1.5mm. We would expect this drive to be S3 since it needs to pack in sixteen dies. The nominal PCB thickness for M.2 is 0.8mm, so this puts the drive at ~2.3mm, and the datasheet lists 2.38mm. This isn’t too interesting on its own, but it could be useful if you know the exact limitations of your device or need to make other measurements, such as for custom cooling. Some devices can take double-sided devices, which, as you can imagine, have similar height thresholds but with components on both sides.

One other interesting thing is the rated power: 3.3V at 1.8A puts the peak power around 6W. This is well higher than the specification sheet, which, again, is for average and also with read and write separately rather than mixed, as well as what’s listed by SMART and in our testing. We reckon this drive will always be below 5W, which normally would ensure there won’t be any heat issues. For M.2 2280, that’s broadly true, but heat is always an issue for 2230.

In addition to the sole NAND flash package, the drive also has a DRAM-less SSD controller and power management circuitry. The controller is proprietary Sandisk technology, listed as the A101-000171-A1. Similar to the WD Black SN7100's A101-000172-A1, which is a four-channel controller that can take fast enough flash to saturate PCIe 4.0. We would expect the drives to share the same flash, too, which would be Sandisk’s 218-Layer TLC. BiCS8 flash, whether TLC or QLC, has proven to have fantastic random read latency and also excellent power efficiency. This makes it great for the M.2 2230 segment.

The 7100M is still DRAM-less, as it can be difficult to make a DRAM package work in this form factor. In the past, it was not uncommon to see DRAM at least in M.2 2242, but modern host memory buffer (HMB) solutions are quite good. A quick look at the random 4KB results for this drive will dispel any illusions that you need DRAM to make a drive feel fast. In fact, it’s very unlikely DRAM would ever make a difference in the type of device this drive is made for, although there are always exceptions. Yes, there are some odd drives that have DRAM as part of the controller package – SK hynix’s BC711 comes to mind –, but these are rare and relegated to the Gen 3 era. An OEM Gen 3 drive is perfectly enough for a Steam Deck, but we’re in the business of gauging modern retail options.

The older Black SN770M, which is a retail version of the OEM SN740 – an extremely popular drive when the Steam Deck was still young – and a shortened version of the Black SN770, struggled with power efficiency. At least, in comparison to some of the newer 2230 drives on the block. With that problem out of the way, thanks to more efficient flash, the 7100M might very well be the best drive of its type available. We certainly think so, but knowing the pedigree of the hardware can help explain why this is.

MORE: Best SSDs

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MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Comparison Products

The Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M is slated to be the top for M.2 2230 SSDs, so we are putting it up against our best drives. These include the Crucial P310, which, despite being QLC-based, is the fastest all-around 2230 drive up to this point, and the Corsair MP600 Mini with the Phison E27T. The Phison E27T controller, when paired with TLC flash, as is the case with the Corsair drive, is about as fast as you can get, but more importantly, it has the advantages of TLC. This means more consistent performance and better endurance. The Optimus GX 7100M, also with TLC flash, is therefore the ultimate challenger.

For other hardware, we have the Kingston NV3 that uses a comparable SMI controller. We have an SMI controller in the Lexar Play, too, although at a lower speed. The 7100M’s predecessor, the WD Black SN770M, is also in play. This drive and its OEM counterpart became popular picks after the Steam Deck came out, offering, at the time, the best performance possible at the cost of higher power consumption. Alternatives here generally use the Phison E21T controller with various TLC and QLC flash choices. These include the Silicon Power UD90, the Sabrent Rocket Q4, and the Teamgroup MP44S.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities, including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive, and an evaluation for future-proofing is included where applicable.

If you’re buying an M.2 2230 SSD, you’re probably buying it for gaming. Yes, there are productivity machines with small form factor SSDs, and you could buy this drive and use it with an extender for a random system, but gaming is the one place it has to do well. Frankly, we’re impressed with how well the 7100M does here. It’s second only to the P310 and is first among TLC-based drives. Beating the TLC-equipped, E27T-based MP600 Mini is an accomplishment. This drive will be very responsive for gaming, and we’d even put it above the P310 for that, in fact. This is because the P310 is using QLC flash – with a fuller drive, with a lifetime of transfers and wear, it should suffer more, meaning you’d pick the 7100M for peace of mind. At the very least, it’s a deciding point if the prices are close.

As a side note, this drive is supported by the Sandisk Dashboard and, as such, has the Game Mode feature. This mode works by disabling the drive’s idle power states, improving responsiveness. This can slightly improve game loading times. The Dashboard is designed for Windows.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is an industry standard trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

The 7100M proves to be great at productivity, too, more or less tied for first in PCMark 10 with the P310. Our QLC caveat applies again: all else being equal, you’d probably pick the TLC 7100M over the P310. We want to emphasize that there are many good DRAM-less drives that can get near this performance level, but you don’t see that hardware in this form factor. For example, we don’t see the Maxio MAP1602 controller here, for a variety of reasons. That controller does tend to run hot, for one thing, and that’s always a looming concern for this form factor. We also don’t see much from SMI, and when we do, it’s usually for budget drives. This reduces the amount of direct resistance to the 7100M.

Phison exists, but the E21T and controllers of that class were and remain much more present in this form factor. That’s partly because the M.2 2230 form factor took off around the same time that such drive technology came out, and now we have a very uncomfortable memory market. Also, the Steam Deck is PCIe 3.0, so you only need so much performance for the most popular destination device. Even with 4.0 devices, a 5 GB/s drive is plenty of performance for a portable system. That means that a drive like the 7100M has less direct competition than you might expect if we’re talking about performance. It’s nearly peerless, in fact. If that’s what you want, then this drive should be at the very top of your list.

Steam Deck Testing — Gaming, KDiskMark, and Temperature

The Steam Deck is not the only portable gaming system in town, but it was the first and most popular to take M.2 2230 SSDs. While some systems have moved on to fit 2280-length drives, 2230 remains popular for many systems, and such drives will work fine in longer slots with the proper standoff or extender. The Deck operates in PCIe 3.0 mode for its SSD, limiting maximum bandwidth, but that has less of an impact on responsiveness/latency, and the Deck is still useful for gauging drive temperature and power efficiency.

Our current testing for the Deck involves analyzing game load times for some popular games. This is probably the most important metric for gamers, but the difference between one SSD and another can be small. We also use KDiskMark, a CrystalDiskMark-like substitute that uses the flexible I/O (FIO) tester instead of diskspd for its underlying benchmarks. We also check the drive’s maximum temperature during this test.

The tests in this section are run under the stock Arch-based SteamOS Linux platform, but our other tests are conducted as per our normal reviews, using Windows. Many portable gaming systems today use or can use Windows with multi-boot as an option. This testing section is instead designed to give an idea of Linux performance, which does involve the use of Proton.

The 7100M does well in all of this testing and runs relatively cool, too. We specifically want to point out its excellent random read performance at QD1, a metric that most readily correlates with responsiveness or “feel.” The P310 pulls away at a higher queue depth, but this is mostly not relevant to what this drive needs to do. We’d say the 7100M’s biggest weak point is the QD1 sequential read speed, merely good but significantly below the P310’s. Many apps and games have low QD sequential reads for loading, and it’s possible the P310 will be slightly quicker for some titles. The magnitude of this, on average, across apps and games will likely be tiny, to say the least, and further, we think that a fuller and realistically worn drive might favor the TLC-based 7100M in the long term. Then again, you probably won’t be fully wearing out any drive in a portable gaming system. We’d probably focus more on heat and power draw, which we address further below.

We do want to point out that QD1 sequential read performance is excellent in our CrystalDiskMark test below. KDiskMark is running on Linux and is built on FIO, which is a different I/O stack. Additionally, on the Deck, we’re testing drives only at PCIe 3.0 speeds. Furthermore, in some cases, weak CPUs – and this applies to many APUs – as well as different platforms, can impact storage performance results. If your portable device is running on something more modern with Windows and PCIe 4.0, it’s quite possible your results will align more with CDM.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real-world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

The 7100M delivers the highest copy rate in DiskBench, along with the highest read transfer rate. In a portable device, such as one that would take a primary M.2 2230 drive, you often don’t have a lot of fast transfer sources. You might have only a 10Gbps external drive, a relatively slow microSD card, and so forth. Copying on the same drive still occurs with updates and other procedures, and you are essentially relying on a single drive to manage most things on the system. For this reason, the DiskBench results are still useful for gauging how well a drive can manage mixed workloads. The 7100M handles that like a champ, and the high read performance – considering you do a lot of reads – is also a bonus.

The only anomaly here is the write speed, which was also a bit low in our previous Steam Deck test section. Write performance can be misleading for many reasons. Most pertinently, modern drives use pSLC caching, which can “hide” the true performance of the native flash. This can mean performance is not always consistent. Manufacturers can optimize the drive firmware with this in mind, making trade-offs such as varying the cache size to improve sustained performance. Drives ultimately have to move data over from the cache to the native flash, so test results don’t always align with expectations. To get a fuller idea of write performance, you should check our Write Saturation section.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

The first signs of weakness on this drive appear in ATTO, but things are not as bad as they first appear. We’re talking about read performance, and when looking at our logarithmic chart, the jumps up and down don’t seem as bad. While throttling could affect this test, generally, that’s not the case. It helps that we see the same pattern with the WD Black SN7100, as we can rule out any randomness.

However, we don’t see it with the WD Blue SN5100, which uses BiCS8 QLC and a comparable controller, so this is probably a feature of BiCS8 TLC. We also don’t see it on the WD Black SN8100 or Corsair MP700 Pro XT, drives with that flash but controllers from SMI and Phison, respectively, so it’s not the flash on its own, either. Given the drops are at 64KiB and 256KiB – with 16KiB pages, this is with 4-way and 16-way interleaving, which aligns both with the flash channel count and the four-plane count dies – it’s likely an artifact of how the proprietary controller manages the reads. Sandisk has some interesting optimization going on, which you can see most clearly with random reads and power efficiency, so we don’t want to jump to conclusions, especially as long as real-world performance remains strong.

Thankfully, it does. The 7100M has incredibly low 4KB random read latency at QD1 in CDM, blowing away the rest of the 2230 drives. As we pointed out above, the competition here is more limited in comparison to full-length drives, which helps the 7100M stand out even more. In many cases, you could look only at this result and be convinced that this is the drive to get. However, as we’ve stated in the past, a good rule of thumb is ~45µs if you want a top-notch experience, and other drives hit that. The 7100M just takes it to a new level.

Sequential read performance at QD1 is also very important; in fact, it is sometimes overlooked with regard to game and app load times. It often deserves to be weighted alongside random 4KB. Luckily, the 7100M is tops here, too. WD and Sandisk have this mastered, as the SN770M is a monster as well. Given that the 7100M can push even more bandwidth with efficient flash, just chef’s kiss.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states including the steady state write performance.

Modern drives tend to write in three states: the pSLC cache, direct to the native flash, and in a folding mode. The first mode is temporary and fast, converting native flash into single-bit mode to trade capacity for speed. When space gets tight, the drive can choose to write straight to the flash. This is slower and can be worse for endurance in some cases. When space is completely exhausted, the drive is forced to wait for data to go through the pSLC cache and be “folded” over to the native flash, is far slower and decreases drive consistency and responsiveness. Most of the time, you want to be in the cache, especially with an M.2 2230 drive, but it’s worth seeing how the drive might behave if it’s left in a fuller state after sustaining writes.

How the pSLC cache is handled varies from drive to drive. A larger cache can handle larger bursts of traffic, but this can leave the drive more vulnerable in some cases. A smaller cache can result in more consistent drive performance. There are also two types of pSLC cache, static and dynamic, with different characteristics. Generally speaking, the static portion is always available, while the dynamic portion is altered with the amount of free space. Proprietary solutions such as Samsung’s TurboWrite and WD’s or Sandisk’s nCache – with nCache 4.0 on this drive – use both types in tandem.

WD’s and Sandisk’s most recent drives have opted for larger caches. This is also true for Samsung, which, with the Samsung 990, has significantly increased the size of the cache. In the 7100M’s case, the cache takes up almost the entire drive. The drive wrote at over 6.4 GB/s for 110 seconds, implying a ~708GB cache. With three bits in TLC needed per pSLC bit, this is quite large for a 2TB drive, although there is a little free space, which helps keep the drive from flatlining completely. Instead, the drive is able to maintain a middle mode around 2.9 GB/s for a small amount of time, which is, honestly, quite fast for such a mode. In most cases, this would be an adequate cushion.

After that, the drive oscillates when hitting the folding mode. Performance is much less consistent as space is periodically freed. We see an actual peak of around 1,450 MB/s here, which is about half of that 2.9 GB/s. This is a common ratio because when you’re folding, you’re essentially writing twice. However, the controller is juggling many things as it is attempting to remain responsive to incoming I/O while moving data in the background. Therefore, performance dips further with a bottom closer to 500 MB/s or so. Over time, this gives us an average of 894 MB/s, which isn’t too bad. By all standards, it’s better than any QLC-based drive and is respectable for a TLC drive with such a large cache.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade, as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage in terms of capacity and performance. Desktops are often more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case scenario for idle.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption, but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording, we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature, but real-world temperatures will vary due to the environment and workload factors.

The 7100M does not disappoint in power efficiency. It’s the most power-efficient drive on this list and the most power-efficient M.2 2230 SSD that we’ve tested. We feel like anything over about 500 MB/s per watt is good enough for this segment, but getting above that into the P310 or NV3 range is better. It’s hard to argue with this result.

Drives can have multiple sensors for different things. Temperatures can be reported for the flash memory, the DRAM if present, the PMIC, and the controller. Typically, these values are not super accurate and certainly will be different from directly measured temperatures, as often they are a composite. This essentially means the drive reports a general temperature measured against a range for throttling.

Measured temperatures from the 7100M’s sensors came in at 73°C, 76°C, and 85°C for peak readings. The drive is rated to throttle at 90°C with a critical temperature of 94°C. Generally, we like to have at least 10°C of headroom and preferably twice that. So, the numbers here do give us pause, but they can be explained. If we compare the P310, for example, we have another very efficient drive that, in our testing, got within 5 degrees of throttling. The reason is simple: this short form factor has all the hardware pressed together. It’s hard to get around that fact, and it’s very common for 2230 drives to throttle or overheat in portable devices, especially when traveling in warmer climates. You usually have little to no cooling right next to a maxed-out APU, after all.

Another consideration is the workload. You’re unlikely to have sustained writes of the type we’re doing. If you’re on a Steam Deck or an older device, you’re also going to be running in PCIe 3.0 mode. Drives will run much cooler in that mode or with everyday workloads. To add to that, these temperatures don’t reflect actual internal ones or the real limits of the hardware. You should not assume that high temps like this mean the drive won’t have a long lifespan, especially since your host device will likely spend most of its time sleeping.

That said, we do recommend you treat your drive well. If it is at all possible to improve cooling – and this could be a simple matter of adding some thermal interface material or a low-profile heatsink – then you should consider it. Avoid breaking warranties, of course. A good example of what we’re talking about is the Apple MacBook Neo. The main chip on it runs notoriously hot, and DIYers have shown that even adding just some thermal padding can significantly improve performance. The chip still throttles, though. This is the reality of portable devices like this, and thankfully, your SSD won’t be running full blast like an APU any time soon. So we don’t think this is a major drawback of the 7100M – it’s just difficult to escape – but you should be aware that top-tier Gen 4 performance comes at a cost.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications, such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus, disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Bottom Line

The Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M is, in a word, fantastic. Anyone who loved the WD Black SN7100 as a proper successor to the WD Black SN770, especially for its class-leading random read performance and power efficiency, can now get that in M.2 2230. The Black SN7100 has been the best SSD for laptops, and now smaller portable devices can enjoy new levels of storage comfort, too.

The 7100M doesn’t disappoint with high levels of performance across-the-board and excellent power efficiency. It’s not always the fastest, but it’s very fast where it matters and doesn’t have the power consumption issue of the previous WD Black SN770M. Even though these drives usually end up on a Linux machine such as the Steam Deck with SteamOS, Sandisk’s excellent Windows software suite is a cherry on top if you’re working with that OS, are multi-booting, or need to work with the drive on your main Windows PC. The drive is also great for enclosures, particularly ones for M.2 2230 drives, and you can extend this drive with an M.2 extender accessory for other slots. It’s just a solid product, no matter what.

The drive lacks a full capacity range of SKUs, but we can’t hold that against it. Higher capacities cannot be achieved without going double-sided or up to M.2 2242. Lower capacities have generally been less desirable, and performance would be lower, too. It wouldn’t be the first time a new 2230 model was limited to 1TB, but Sandisk is going for 2TB out of the gate. Sandisk opted for the two most popular capacities, and performance is stellar for both. Power consumption is also low for both, which is useful for the battery-limited target devices for the drive. It’s really hard to find fault here.

Although it’s not easy to find downsides to this drive, we do feel there are enough drawbacks to prevent it from getting a perfect score. We feel the pricing isn’t too far out there given the current market, and that aside, we’re then looking at performance and cooling. Performance is not always consistent across our tests, and while Sandisk’s pSLC optimization makes sense within the greater product stack, they could have taken a cue from Phison and been more conservative with it. There are people who will want to use this drive in fast enclosures, and having more consistent, sustained writes could help them. But this is a nitpick.

Of more concern is the heat output of the drive, which, to be fair, is also not really Sandisk’s fault. This level of performance in a tight package is going to put out some heat. Because the drive has to fit in a range of devices, Sandisk can’t really throw on a heatsink or anything like that. The drive will be fine in any Gen 3 device and, hopefully, any properly designed Gen 4 device. Alternative drives do not necessarily offer any advantage over the 7100M here, either. Nevertheless, we’ve seen from newer controller designs like the Phison E31T that you could probably do better in this form factor. Sandisk is using existing technology from its stack, and that makes the most financial sense, but that also leaves in our mind the knowledge that a better product could exist.

We’d say that’s quite complimentary to Sandisk, considering the 7100M is the best M.2 2230 drive on the market. If you’re looking for the best 2230 drive, this is it. Your experience is going to be fantastic in every way – fast load times, good power consumption levels, and software support with True Image and a respected toolbox if you need it. You will pay a premium for it, but particularly for an enthusiast Gen 4 device, this is well worth it. On the other hand, your device might come with a fast, capacious drive, so you wouldn’t be looking at the 7100M, anyway. If you’re on the budget end of things, you can save money here, too. Any of the other 2230 drives on the list will probably be sufficient in that case. The 7100M is an investment, but a sound one, and we can highly recommend it.

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Kioxia and Sandisk used the ongoing Future of Memory and Storage Conference to formally introduce their latest BiCS10 3D QLC NAND device, which features the world's highest areal density and is aimed at high-capacity data center-grade solid-state drives that are meant to maximize storage density in data centers. The new IC comes at the step of Kioxia's and Sandisk's BiCS 3D TLC NAND device that offers an areal density of over 29 Gb/mm².

Kioxia's and Sandisk's BiCS10 3D QLC NAND device introduced at FMS features an areal density of 37 Gb/mm², which makes it the world's densest 3D NAND storage device formally introduced to date. The device features 332 active layers as well as an up to 4,800 MT/s interface with a separate command address (SCA) capability, but the manufacturers do not disclose the actual capacity of the IC. Typically, assuming the same number of memory cells and roughly the same die size as the 1Tb BiCS10 3D TLC NAND chip introduced last month, the new memory device should have a capacity of 1.33 Tb, though we are speculating.

The new BiCS10 3D QLC NAND flash IC with record storage density is aimed at data center-grade SSDs that must offer both high-capacity and decent performance enabled by high-speed I/O of flash memory. Since such applications also strive to reduce power consumption, Kioxia and Sandisk also implemented their power-isolated low-tapped termination (PI-LTT) technique designed to reduce the power consumed by high-speed output drivers without sacrificing signal integrity.

Since Kioxia and Sandisk produce their BiCS10 3D QLC NAND device using their latest BiCS10 process technology, they not only achieve the record bit density, but also lower costs compared to competing high-density 3D QLC NAND ICs once their yields reach target levels. As a result, the two companies will be able to offer ultra-high-capacity SSDs at prices that are lower compared to those of rivals, or get higher margins while selling at similar prices.

"By redefining the performance and efficiency envelope of QLC NAND, our 10^th Generation BiCS QLC 3D flash memory delivers simultaneous gains in density, bandwidth, and energy efficiency and establishes a new paradigm for high‑capacity flash storage to provide a scalable foundation for next‑generation infrastructure applications," said Alper Ilkbahar, chief technology officer at Sandisk.

Kioxia and Sandisk intend to use their BiCS10 3D NAND devices primarily for data center-grade storage (read: AI-oriented SSDs that need capacity and performance), so it remains to be seen whether we are going to see such ICs on client SSDs any time soon.

Sandisk and SK hynix on Tuesday formally introduced the High Bandwidth Flash (HBF) specification, their jointly developed storage technology that promises to bring together the non-volatility of 3D NAND and the performance of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM), which will be handy for AI inference systems. The specification was released through the Open Compute Project (OCP), so it will be an open standard rather than a proprietary interface.

The initial specification defines HBF packages with capacities of up to 512GB using either 8-Hi or 16-Hi NAND die stacks, though these will not be standard 3D NAND stacks, but rather specialized devices with a fast interface. In fact, Sandisk once called them HBF core dies rather than 3D NAND die stacks.

Performance of HBF is divided into three bandwidth grades ranging from approximately 0.4 TB/s to 3.0 TB/s (though we are not sure whether this figure describes the full HBF subsystem or per-package bandwidth). Such a huge performance range implies that Sandisk and SK hynix expect HBF to have a multi-year roadmap featuring multiple implementations and generations of HBF. It is noteworthy that the most capable implementation of HBF (3 TB/s) is set to beat the memory bandwidth of a single HBM4 memory stack (2 TB/s), though it will be unlikely to beat HBM4 when it comes to latency.

Interestingly, SK hynix claims that HBF uses the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe) standard to simplify integration with heterogeneous computing platforms, whereas Sandisk claims that HBF is set to adopt the 'xPU-HBF' interface, which could be its definition of UCIe implemented by companies like Broadcom or Marvell.

In addition to capacity and performance targets, the specification establishes electrical and interface characteristics, packaging and reliability guidelines for stacked HBF devices, as well as software I/O requirements. For now, these specifications are not officially published by the OCP.

Extracting 400 GB/s of bandwidth from a single 512GB HBF package is not a trivial task. To enable such a package, Sandisk once planned to use 16 HBF core dies that feature many, many arrays that can be accessed concurrently using dedicated read/write paths. Meanwhile, it is possible to reach over 400 GB/s of bandwidth per package using a single UCIe interface that runs at up to 64 GT/s and features 64 lanes. Yet, this means that the HBF base die will be a fairly complex piece of silicon.

Sandisk and SK hynix position HBF as a new memory tier for AI inference workloads by combining near-memory bandwidth with the higher capacity and non-volatility of NAND flash. The technology is aimed at workloads that require substantially larger memory pools close to compute than HBM alone can economically provide. For example, while the maximum capacity of an HBM4 stack is 64GB, an HBF stack can provide up to 512GB. Even at a lower bandwidth, such memory can be useful for inference workloads.

Arguably the biggest question about HBF is who is going to adopt the technology? Since Sandisk and SK hynix announced plans to collaborate on defining the HBF specification in 2025, only Google and Tenstorrent have expressed interest in participating in the HBF consortium. Meanwhile, AMD, Broadcom, Intel, Nvidia, Marvell, Micron, Qualcomm, Samsung, and Western Digital have so far expressed no interest in HBF.

SSD prices in general remain considerably higher than a year ago. Still, this discount on Samsung's 9100 Pro 2TB SSD is a welcome sight, as Samsung's fastest PCIe Gen 5.0 drive returns to the lower pricing that we witnessed during the most recent Amazon Prime Day sales event at the end of last month. You can currently grab the 2TB Samsung 9100 Pro for $399.99 at Amazon, a discount of 41% compared to its list price. That's only $10 more than Samsung's excellent 2TB 990 Pro SSD at $389.99, and $30 more than Samsung's recently released 2TB 990 at $369.99, which are both previous-generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs with half of the available bandwidth speeds.

● Check out this Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB SSD deal at Amazon
● Check out this Samsung 990 Pro 2TB SSD deal at Amazon
● Check out this Samsung 990 2TB SSD deal at Amazon

Samsung's 9100 Pro SSD boasts sequential read speeds of up to 14,700MB/s and write speeds of 13,400MB/s thanks to the available PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, making it one of the fastest drives on the market, perfect for heavy professional application workloads, and of course top-end gaming PCs.

By contrast, the 990 Pro offers about half the read and write speeds of this drive at around 7,450/6,900MB/s, with the recently released Samsung 990 offering up to 7,250/6,450 MB/s, but switching from TLC to QLC NAND. These drives pretty much max out the PCIe Gen 4 bandwidth, with the new Samsung 990 being marketed as a budget-oriented SSD, but in reality and most importantly, in terms of pricing, the difference between the Samsung 990 and the much faster 9100 Pro is just $30.

We've reviewed Samsung's 9100 Pro and found this impressive Gen 5 drive to be one of the fastest SSDs available to buy. During benchmark testing, the Samsung drive placed near the very top of the charts. In our PCMark 10 Storage tests. the 9100 scored higher than any other drive we've tested.

However, if your motherboard doesn't support PCIe Gen 5, or you only have a single Gen 5 M.2 slot on your mobo and need to populate any other spare M.2 slots with PCIe Gen 4 SSDs, then the Samsung 990 Pro is the best shout.

Or save a further $20 and opt for Samsung's latest SSD, the 2TB 990. This PCIe Gen 4 drive opts for QLC NAND, but still has fast access speeds. The drive can reach 7,250/6,450MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 850K/1,200K random read and write IOPS.

RAM and SSDs are some of the toughest PC components to get your hands on at the moment at prices that won't give your bank account an aneurysm, so we take any discounts we can. Especially if it helps us build or upgrade our beloved PCs for slightly less. There's currently no end in sight for memory and NAND prices to return to more normalized values until manufacturers can ramp up production, and AI hyperscalers stop sweeping up all the demand. So definitely give these Samsung SSD deals a look if you're on the hunt for an SSD upgrade.

When you build a new PC, there are many things to factor in. I personally like to build rigs that, first, are capable of the tasks that I want them to perform, and secondly, are equipped with components and specs that can afford me some amount of future-proofing. In my household, we operate a trickle-down system, where my son inherits my PC bits and pieces when I upgrade parts, so they can’t be too out of date, or I get complaints.

I use my PCs for video editing, streaming, and various other content creation and productivity tasks, but I also use them for some PC gaming fun. There’s always a pull towards going for the biggest and the best when building a gaming PC, so you can have settings dialed up to the max, with incredibly smooth frame rates on a ridiculously expensive monitor with an insane refresh rate. But unfortunately, I don’t have unlimited funds.

Everyone knows that having a higher-end graphics card, with bigger processors and more VRAM, has a direct impact on how your game runs, but what’s not so clear is how much effect your SSD storage pick has on your game's performance metrics. The short answer is that it’s not as important as your CPU or GPU, but it typically only has a slight effect on your game performance, depending on the game you're playing and whether it’s streaming levels or pre-loading them.

The most important thing to first factor in with an SSD is the capacity. Games have grown in size exponentially over the last decade, with some of the latest titles demanding up to 150GB and more just for the one game. My son's Ark: Survival Evolved game with all the added DLC content fills up a 512GB SSD on its own, so if you have a lot of games that you want ready to play at a moment's notice, then you need a larger capacity SSD to have them all installed. In my gaming PC, I have 6TB of storage, which is ample for me, and because I don’t have the fastest internet connection, I prefer to keep my games installed.

If you have an amazingly fast internet connection with high download speed capabilities and don’t need to worry about any kind of metered connection rates, then this will also affect how much storage you need. If you can download any game you want in 5-10 minutes or less, then capacity isn’t as big a concern. You can just uninstall and reinstall a game whenever you want, provided you aren’t in the danger zone with your SSD endurance metrics. The minimum-sized SSD I’d recommend, though, is a 1 TB drive.

If you’re running a traditional hard disk drive for gaming, you should definitely upgrade. An HDD has an average read speed of 100-150 MB/s, compared to the latest PCIe 5.0 SSDs that have peak read speeds of around 14,500 MB/s. Now, although you don’t need read speeds that fast for gaming, the difference is humongous. A game running on an HDD may take 45 seconds to load a level, compared to just a few seconds for the SSD. Even the oldest SSD technology would be an improvement over your optical disk.

When building or upgrading a gaming PC, SSD manufacturer marketing often pushes massive sequential speeds (like 7,000 MB/s or 14,000 MB/s). However, the real-world impact of read and write speeds on actual gameplay is much more nuanced. The effect that a superfast PCIe 5.0 SSD has on frame rates compared to a PCIe 3.0 SSD is virtually imperceptible, as the frame rate rendering is predominantly handled by your GPU, VRAM, CPU, and system RAM. Your PC will use your SSD to load game assets from storage into the VRAM/RAM, and then mostly sit idle during the rendering of the game while you’re playing it.

If you’re playing a game with a massive open world or large levels, there may be the occasional request for assets (textures, models, shaders, etc.), but the most important spec of your SSD in that scenario will be its IOPS speed, or random read speed. Write speeds typically do not affect active gameplay performance, as playing a game predominantly consists of read operations.

Patching the game, downloading the game, or copying a game file will make use of the SSD's read and write speeds. And if you use background recording programs like SteelSeries GG, Xbox Game Bar, or OBS, that will also make use of the drive speeds, but again, the effect on the actual gameplay is typically very minimal.

So, to answer my initial question, how much SSD storage and speed do you need for pure gaming? Well, you can use anything from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 5.0; the impact of peak read and write speeds is often negligible if you aren’t playing a Direct Storage-capable title. Capacity is the most important factor, and you should base that on how many games you want to store on your system. If you want to choose your SSD to perform more than gaming, then the speeds start to matter, plus SSD features like DRAM and HMB, but that's another story.

Your choices will also be very much affected by pricing. If you can get a 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD for the same price as a 2 TB PCIe 5.0 model, the choice is simple. However, we are in one of the toughest periods in recent memory for storage prices, and the usual rules don’t apply. Prices are all over the place, with PCIe 3.0 drives not necessarily cheaper than the more recent PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 drives. What was $80 a year ago is now $250 for the same product. To give you a small idea of prices and capacities, here are some of the most popular SSD drives with their PCIe generation, capacities, and prices.

PCIe 3.0 M.2 SSDs

PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 SSDs

PCIe 5.0 M.2 SSDs (Ultra High-End)