Seagate is on track to start qualification of its hard disk drives featuring 50TB-class capacities in late calendar 2027, with shipments to follow in 2028, the company announced this week. Demand for HDDs is so strong because of the rise of AI and continued strength of the cloud computing business that most drives are sold out through 2028 and negotiations about allocations for 2029 are ongoing.

"Mozaic 5, our 5+ terabyte per disk platform, remains on track for qualification shipments in late calendar 2027," said Dave Mosley, chief executive officer of Seagate, during the company's earnings call with financial analysts and investors.

Mozaic 5 is the company's 3^rd generation platform for commercial hard drives based on Seagate's heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that succeeds Mozaic 3 and Mozaic 4. The Mozaic 5 platform enables the company to build platters with over 5TB capacity and consequently build 10-platter HDDs with over 50TB capacity featuring conventional magnetic recording (CMR) for clients seeking performance and versatility or shingled magnetic recording (SMR) for clients that need maximum capacity to maximize their storage density.

If Seagate preps to initiate 'qualification shipments' of its 50TB-class hard drives in late calendar 2027, then it means that by the time the HDDs have passed all the manufacturer's internal validations, including reliability and durability of heads and media, shock and vibration tests, and longevity tests among many others. It typically takes server OEMs about two to six months to qualify new HDDs for their offerings, whereas hyperscale cloud service providers usually qualify them for six to 12 months. In any case, it is safe to say that Seagate is on track to ship 50TB-class hard drives in calendar 2028 with significant volume ramp in 2029.

These 50TB-class HDDs will come to market just in time to meet exabyte demand from the AI and cloud sectors. Most of Seagate's nearline HDDs have been allocated for 2027 and 2029 under long-term supply agreements (LTAs), with some customers looking to secure supply in 2029.

"Based on the long-term supply agreements in place today, the vast majority of our nearline exabytes are now allocated into calendar 2028," Mosley said. "[…] As our strategic relationships deepen, many are actively seeking to extend planning horizons through 2029 and beyond, which we believe reflects growing confidence in their own long-term infrastructure needs."

Seagate's LTAs not only define exabytes, but also product configuration and prices. As it turns out, both are set for the 'entirety of calendar 2027.' Meanwhile, Seagate is flexible on pricing of drives that are not covered by LTAs as well as newly signed LTAs, so the company is implying price increases, following makers of 3D NAND and SSDs.

"We continue to execute our value-based pricing strategy, balancing a stronger demand environment with our objective of supporting sustainable, profitable growth over the long term," Mosley said.

"Our volume was a little bit higher in fiscal Q4," said Gianluca Romano, chief financial officer of Seagate, during the call. "We think can be maybe a little bit of output available in fiscal Q1. Of course, we are pricing that increased output at a very good price right now."

The key advantage of Seagate's high-capacity drives based on the company's Mozaic platforms is, of course, its HAMR technology, which is gradually increasing its share within the company's nearline HDD shipments. HAMR-based products accounted for a 40% exabyte share of Seagate's nearline HDDs as of early July and are on track to account for 70% of the company's nearline exabytes shipments by early July 2027. Moreover, nearly half of Seagate's nearline capacity will rely on its 40TB-class HDDs featuring its Mozaic 4 platform.

"We expect to achieve our next ramp milestone by exiting calendar 2026 with 50% of our HAMR exabytes on our Mozaic 4 platform," Mosley said.

For the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2026 ended on July 3, Seagate earned $3.629 billion, up from $2.444 billion it earned in the same quarter a year ago. The company's gross margin totaled 52.3%, up from 37.4% in Q4 FY2025, and its net income reached $1.294 billion. The company's FY2026 revenue was $12.195 billion, up from $9.097 billion in the prior year. The net income increased more than twice year-over-year to $3.184 billion, with gross margin reaching 45.6%.

Following our brief tour around the state of RAM pricing in 2026, it seemed only fair to extend our ‘State of the Union’ look at PC component pricing to another market that has taken an absolute beating in the AI crunch: SSDs.

It’s a sadly familiar tale. Like RAM, SSDs were once an afterthought when it came to PC building — you always knew you could find a ton of capacity, decent speeds, and a reputable brand at a reasonable price. Like RAM, SSD shortages have driven absolutely insane price rises across the board, and like RAM, the death of Micron’s Crucial has seen a major player leave the scene.

As you can imagine, the SSD market is decidedly more complex and fragmented than the RAM market, for obvious reasons. Whereas your principal choice of RAM boils down to DDR4 vs DDR5, and then capacity, there are a plethora of SSD solutions for PC. There are M.2 drives for performance, or larger SATA SSDs for volume or even external storage. The former also sees vast performance differences between Gen 5 and Gen 4 options, adding another dimension.

Sadly, prices on SSDs generally have skyrocketed. This uncomplicates the picture slightly. But just how badly have SSD prices changed in the last year, and can you buy an affordable SSD these days?

12 months on

We’re fortunate to be carrying out this look 12 months removed from the 2025 Amazon Prime Day event, which means we have a plethora of pricing and sales data from exactly a year ago that we can use to pinpoint just how badly the SSD market has tanked. As we did with RAM, we’ll start with our fabled 2025 Amazon Prime Day build, in which we recommended users kit out our 1440p, 7800X3D gaming rig with a Samsung 990 EVO Plus 2TB SSD. The deal at the time was a hefty discount, bringing the price to $113, down from $176. That same drive is on sale right now, discounted by 36%, to an eye-watering $363, triple the price. The list price of that drive is $579.99, and the highest actual price we’ve seen on it is $465 in May this year, more than four times what it cost a year ago.

Famously, buying a 4TB SSD could net you M.2 storage for your PC for as little as $0.05 per GB just over a year ago, with devices like the WD Blue SN5000 and Silicon Power UD90 costing just $214 and $209, respectively. The SN5000 has doubled in price to $449.99, with the cost per GB at 11.2 cents.

SATA: No less painful

You’d be forgiven for thinking that toning down your storage for a less potent SATA III drive would be a great way to save some money over an M.2 drive, but you’d be wrong. Case in point is a drive we've been watching on Amazon for some time, the Samsung 870 Evo. This 2 TB drive was once just $80, and no more than $150 a year ago. Now, Amazon is selling it discounted by 62% at a cost of $399, with a list price of an eye-watering $1,039. That’s not a typo; that’s a 2021 hard drive with 2TB of storage now listed at a price of over $1,000. Of course, much like RAM, these numbers and prices aren’t really real, which makes it absolutely impossible to try and pin down the reasonable price of SSD storage in 2026.

A crucial factor

Micron announced in December that it was shuttering its consumer outfit Crucial in favor of enterprise. With so many SSD vendors and solutions, it’s arguable that Crucial’s absence in the SSD sector will be a little less keenly felt than it will in the RAM industry — after all, Micron is one of only three memory makers in the industry. Still, Crucial’s T-series and P-series drives are capable and performant offerings that will be missed once they disappear from the market completely. Of course, any reduction in competition is going to have an impact on pricing, but Crucial’s loss certainly seems like it will be more felt when it comes to RAM, rather than SSDs.

If you actually need to buy SSD storage

If we discount Gen 3 drives, which you shouldn’t be settling for in 2026, the cheapest you can grab an M.2 SSD these days is 11 cents per GB; specifically, this Silicon Power UD90 is one of the best value drives right now, at $439. SP’s UD90 is also one of the cheapest 1TB options on the market at around $150, and its 2TB option is $244. Of course, the larger the drive, generally, the less you’ll pay per GB when it comes to storage. Simply put, these are the baseline prices for 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB SSDs, respectively, in 2026.

If you want a snappier Gen 5 option, Crucial’s 1TB P510 is $180 dollars right now, while the 2TB version is $340.The popular Samsung 9100 Pro’s 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB drives will set you back $250, $400, and $900, respectively, a truly tragic state of affairs.

Pre-build your way out of the crisis

As with RAM, a pre-built PC is one of the best ways to secure a decent amount of SSD storage. However, unlike RAM, the vendors can more easily obfuscate SSD performance. I’ve been covering PC sales and deals for months since the crisis hit, and it’s clear that vendors find it much easier to hide poor SSD storage inside a pre-built than RAM. The reasons are obvious: it’s very difficult to sugarcoat a PC having 16GB of DDR5 RAM, as opposed to 32GB; however, you can quite easily bury a slower Gen 4 SSD or a less spacious drive inside a pre-built spec sheet.

Generally, I’d recommend pushing towards a build with 32GB of RAM, even if it means compromising on storage. You can always add more SSD space down the line, and while you’d obviously rather have a blistering Gen 5 drive with those 14,000MB/s speeds, Gen 4 will do you just fine for gaming, and likely will for years to come.

AI-driven demand has pushed prices to insanely high levels for the best external SSDs and the best flash drives — if you can find those sought-after models in stock at all these days. But if you’re a long-time PC builder or you've upgraded your laptop's boot drive in the last decade, there’s a good chance you have an older drive of some kind sitting in a drawer or in a closet, doing nothing more useful than collecting dust.

Whether it's a SATA SSD, an OEM M.2 from an older laptop, or even a spinning hard drive, you can turn any of these into handy external storage by picking up one of the best SSD and hard drive enclosures, with some options selling for less than $10 when on sale. In most cases, you won't even have to mess with a screwdriver. Just open the enclosure, drop in your old drive, and you're good to go.

Of course, the drive you have and the enclosure you choose will dictate how fast your DIY external drive will be. But speed doesn't matter much if you're just doing simple backups or transferring a few files. And even a SATA SSD is pretty speedy for most mainstream tasks. If you're using the drive to edit lots of 4K video, doing animation work, or running local LLMs, you'll need a faster, newer PCIe 4 or 5 M.2 SSD and an enclosure that can deliver as much bandwidth as your fastest USB-C port can handle.

To break down the kind of speed you can expect from digging out an older hard drive or SSD and putting it to work as external storage, we installed several older drives (and even a speedy recent PCIe 5 model) into various enclosures and put them through some of the same tests we use for testing brand-new drives. And we'll compare those results to speedy dedicated external SSDs and flash drives, to see what, if any, speed you might lose.

Of course, every individual drive model will have its own performance variances, as we see when testing internal SSDs, but the results and charts below will give you a sense of what to expect, generally, from whatever class or type of drive you happen to have at your disposal, and whether it's speedy enough for your needs.

I grabbed four different drives, three of which were older drives of various types that I found in my storage drawer or in older enclosures, and ran some of the tests that we typically run for external storage reviews, to see how they perform compared to a high-end flash drive and a fast external SSD.

Drives

▶️ Western Digital WD5000BPVT 2.5-inch hard drive (500GB)

This 2011-era 2.5-inch hard drive either came from an old laptop or was something left over from testing in a previous job. I've held onto it, in part, as a photography prop to show storage options in PC cases. It's clearly not a fast drive, but a good representation of the lowest-tier option to build your own portable storage drive.

▶️ Samsung 850 Pro 2.5-inch SATA SSD (512GB)

I originally intended to use my old Crucial MX100 2.5-inch SATA drive for this test (as seen in the main image, above), but when I plugged it in (for the first time in at least five years), it was effectively dead, as it wasn't recognized by any PC I connected it to. So I pivoted to a Samsung 850 Pro, a slightly higher-end drive from the same year (2014). It's sure to be much faster than the spinning-platter hard drive, but as a SATA drive, it's going to top out around 550 Mb/s.

▶️ Intel 660p PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD (2TB)

I picked up a 2TB Intel 660p back in 2019 for $109 (the first time SSDs got really cheap), to use as an external drive. I eventually replaced it with a 4TB Samsung 990 Evo Plus that I bought for $199 about a year ago (the last time storage was cheap). It's rated to 1,800 MB/s read and write at that capacity, so it's good for any 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps enclosures, which is why we tested it in both. But if you're after USB4 or Thunderbolt 3+ speeds, you'll want something faster.

▶️ Gigabyte Aorus 12000 PCIe 5.0 SSD (1TB)

If you want to put together an external drive that's as fast as reasonably possible with a single M.2, you're probably not going to have a drive like that sitting unused in a drawer. So to see what is possible with an SSD that you might pay for, specifically to build an external drive with the fastest possible speeds, I grabbed the Aorus 12000 PCIe 5.0 SSD from Gigabyte. At the 1TB capacity I tested, its rated sequential read (11,700 MB/s) and write (9,500 MB/s) speeds aren't going to be a significant bottleneck, even if you opt for a Thunderbolt 5 enclosure.

Enclosures

▶️ Orico 2139U3-V1 Clear HDD/SSD enclosure (5 Gbps)

There are loads of affordable enclosures for 2.5-inch SATA hard drives and SSDs. You'll want one with UASP support for faster transfers if you are or plan to ever install an SSD, and most are plastic these days. I opted for this one both because I like its transparent shell (so I can see what drive is housed inside) and because it often goes on sale for less than $10. It's $10.99 at full price, but I paid around $8 for it. It snaps together without the need for any screws, which is convenient. But if you're carrying the drive around regularly, I could see the cover falling off now and then.

$8.99 at Amazon

▶️ Lemorele SD3L NVMe M.2 SSD enclosure (10 Gbps)

Affordable M.2 SSD enclosures are also easy to find online. I chose this one, because, again, it sells for around $10. Plus it has a built-in USB-C and USB-A port (one on each end), so you'll never need to fish for a cable, making it kind of like a large flash drive. It also lets you drop in a drive without a screwdriver or other tools. Its main downside is that it doesn't support older SATA M.2 drives, so it's only good for NVMe models.

$9.49 at Amazon

▶️ Asus ROG Strix Aiolos NMVe/SATA M.2 SSD enclosure (20 Gbps)

This premium metal enclosure is also tool-free, and helpfully supports both NVMe and SATA M.2 drives – the former at speeds up to 20 Gbps so long as you have a system with a USB 3.2 Gen 2 2x2 port. It also has some flashy RGB and includes a carrying strap that can make fishing it out of your bag a little easier.

$65.22 at Amazon

▶️ OWC Express 1M2 USB4 / 40Gbps enclosure

An enclosure meant for fast PCIe 4.0 or 5.0 SSDs, this premium model is effectively a large hunk of aluminum with fins for heat dissipation. And when your drive could be slinging data at up to 5,000 MB/s, you'll need that kind of cooling to keep speeds from dropping due to heat. It's far from the cheapest or the smallest, but if you're after some of the fastest external speeds possible from a single drive, you don't want to skimp on something smaller and cheaper. And I prefer this kind of larger, passive cooling over something with a tiny, whiny fan.

$78.99 at Amazon

Comparison of external SSDs and flash drives

To get a sense of how our DIY external drives compare to retail external storage, we will include results in our charts from a trio of current options. On the 10 Gbps front, there's the 1TB Kingston Dual Portable SSD (in a flash drive form factor with USB-C and USB-A ports) that was selling for $226 when this was written.

Stepping things up to 20 Gbps, we have the Crucial X10, a compact drive that we tested in 4TB trim. That capacity doesn't currently appear to be available, but the 2TB option was $304 at Amazon. The key consideration with this (and any 20 Gbps drive or enclosure) is that you'll need a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 Gen2 2x2 port to achieve top speeds. Even if your system has a technically faster USB4 or Thunderbolt port, there's a good chance your drive will be capped at 10 Gbps, because the two-lane 10 Gbps configuration in Gen 2 2x2 differs electrically from USB4 (which is itself built around Thunderbolt 3). Unless you have a specific need, it's smarter to opt for a USB4 or Thunderbolt drive or enclosure at this point.

Speaking of USB4, we also included our favorite drive of that flavor, Corsair's EX400U. It sports a magnetic back for attaching to some phones (and various other things with iron in them), and was selling for over $600 in the 2TB capacity we tested when this was written. Naturally, storage prices are in flux right now, so prices may be different.

Enclosure and drive testing

We tested our drives and enclosures on our USB4-equipped storage test PC, running a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU and Asus' ROG Crosshair X870E Hero motherboard.

▶️ 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. The sequential read and write test effectively amounts to a best-case scenario, which often closely aligns with the read /write specs that drive makers put in their specs and on the product box.

Unsurprisingly, the 2.5-inch hard drive in our Orico enclosure lands last here, putting up reads and writes a bit below 90 MB/s. That's OK for incremental backups and if you only occasionally need to carry around files. But the Samsung 850 Pro is 4-5 times faster in the same enclosure. Speeds below 500 MB/s might seem slow compared to modern SSDs, but it's perfectly serviceable for most tasks, and even running programs.

If you are regularly moving around terabytes of data, though, you'll want something faster. Intel's 660p passed 1,000 MB/s on this test in reads and writes. That's a little slower than our 10 Gbps flash drive, especially on reads, but close enough that you wouldn't notice the difference between the two without running benchmarks.

Dropping that same 660p SSD into the 20 Gbps Asus ROG enclosure, it got close to, but not quite over 2,000 MB/s. The Crucial X10 was about 100 MB faster, but again that's about a 5% difference. So if you have a decent PCIe 3.0 drive sitting around that you can drop into an enclosure, you can get performance that's very close to the much costlier competition.

Stepping up to our PCIe 5.0 Aorus SSD in the large aluminum OWC enclosure, reads and writes topped 3,700 MB/s. On writes, that actually beat Corsair's excellent EX400U, although the OWC-enclosed Aorus did lag about 10% behind on reads. And even if you're buying a bare 2TB PCIe 5 drive and the OWC enclosure, it will cost much less than the Corsair's current $600-plus for the same capacity. A 10% performance difference isn't bad, considering.

The CrystalDiskMark 4K read / write test is more of a measure of how well a drive handles a plethora of small files, the kind of workload you might encounter when running a program, an OS, or a game directly from the drive.

On this test, we see the flash drives are poor choices for running programs or an OS directly from the drive – the 850 Pro doesn't look great on writes, either, although it's a drive that I’ve used as a boot SSD in the past. But the Intel drive in the 10 and 20 Gbps enclosure did better here than the Crucial X10 drive.

On the fast 40 Gbps front, our Aorus test drive and OWC's enclosure did better on reads, but the Corsair EX400U was much faster with small file writes. In reality though, everything but the sub-10 Gbps drives and the Kingston Dual drive should handle small file performance well in most use cases.

▶️ Transfer Rates: DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50 GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive. This is a separate drive from our boot drive to avoid slowdowns due to the operating system background tasks that can be difficult to control.

In this real-world file transfer test, we see somewhat similar, though slower results as we saw with the synthetic sequential test above. Things look better for the Kingston flash drive here, but our 660p Intel drive in the 10 Gbps enclosure is still faster (it jas a thermal advantage being a much larger drive, physically). And the same drive in the 20 Gbps Asus enclosure again beats the 20 Gbps Crucial drive — and significantly when it comes to reads.

Looking at our USB4 OWC enclosure with the Aorus PCIe Gen 5 drive, it impressively blows away the Corsair EX400U. Both drives are fast, but our DIY USB4 drive is nearly 38% faster on reads and almost 70% faster on writes. I suspect some of the advantage comes from the fact that the OWC enclosure is about 5x larger and entirely made out of aluminum, while the Corsair drive has a metal top, but otherwise the shell is mostly plastic.

Final Thoughts

Older drives don’t lose much speed in the right enclosure

We could do a few more tests, but one thing is clear. Depending on what spare drive you have on hand and the enclosure you use, you don't necessarily have to lose any speed if you opt for building your own external storage enclosure rather than buying a retail external drive. Of course, if all you have is a hard drive, you're going to get external hard drive speeds, which are mostly good for basic backup and / or moving a few files between devices. If you have an old SATA SSD, dropping it into the same 2.5-inch enclosure should give you speeds 3-5 times faster than a portable hard drive, which is plenty fast enough to be useful for mainstream tasks. And if all you need to do is buy an enclosure for $8-$15 and drop in an old drive, that's easily the best value in external storage these days. If you have an old SATA M.2 SSD, getting an enclosure for it for less than $20 is a similarly excellent money-saving option.

If you're lucky enough to have an old PCIe 3 NVMe M.2 drive hanging around that you can drop into a 10 Gbps or 20 Gbps enclosure, you can get speeds nearly as fast and, in some cases faster, than competing drives that cost hundreds of dollars.

And if you truly need the fastest external storage speeds, even if you have to buy a 1TB or 2TB PCIe 4 or PCIe 5 drive and a sub-$100 enclosure, you can still achieve comparable or better speed than some of the fastest USB4 options, for hundreds less – although you'll still likely have to spend a few hundred dollars to get there.

In short, we may lament the fact that component price hikes have driven up the cost of components to the point that it's usually cheaper to buy one of the best prebuilt PCs these days than building one yourself. But it's still often cheaper to build your own external SSD than to buy one at today's inflated prices. And if you happen to have a suitable drive sitting around that you aren't using, one you can insert into an enclosure, you could easily save hundreds of dollars. Just remember to check the drive's health before using it to store any irreplaceable data. Because if your old drive had an active life as a boot drive in years past before you replaced it, it could be on its last legs, and no one wants to piece together an external drive only to have it fail after a few weeks or months of use.

With NAND prices flying into the stratosphere, buying a large SSD has become a cold-sweat-inducing event, with even the cheapest 2 TB models now approaching $250 — and desirable performant models going for well beyond that. With no end to either memory or storage shortages in sight, the next best option for gamers is to save on used disk space — and the recently-upgraded Game Compressor utility is a fine tool for that end.

Depending on the game in question, savings can be massive, with ARK Survival Evolved reportedly going down from 169 GB to 91 GB (54% of the original size) and Crimson Desert slimming down by 32 GB. Not every game bears high compressibility, but if even just one of your titles goes down by tens of gigabytes, that's enough to install another. This is handy on most every PC, and even more so for handhelds and machines where disk space is at a premium.

How do you log in to your PC?

The application, which costs $5.99 / 5.99€ on Steam, leverages Windows' built-in LZX folder and file compression to transparently compress on-disk games — sometimes with massive savings. I've used NTFS compression for over two decades with no ill effects, and I occasionally enjoy improved game load times. That might sound counterintuitive, but with a compressed game, there's less I/O data to shuffle around. The only cost is a little bit of CPU overhead, which is almost guaranteed to be available as almost no games can fully utilize all the system's cores.

While it's easy to say that Game Compressor is just a UI for Windows' built-in functionality, the amount of convenience is impressive. You first set up a number of watched folders, of which presumably the ones for Steam games will be filled in. After Compressor scans which games are available, it will actually preview what kind of space savings you can expect, to save you the hassle of going through a long-running task for no benefit.

Once you select your games to compress, the tasks go into a queue, and can be paused or cancelled at any point — a convenience the Windows command line doesn't offer. You can also selectively decompress games later, and there's a log of operations just in case something goes awry. As you might expect, Compressor tries to detect which files (such as videos) aren't worth squeezing further.

One of Game Compressor's neat tricks is that it can monitor games that have received patches to reapply compression. Normally if, say, a 50GB game file gets a patch, it could be decompressed post-patch — this way, the space savings are kept in place.

Just about the only "con" to this notion is that it's not advisable to use compression on DirectStorage-enabled games, because that API relies on IO-to-VRAM operations and adding a CPU decompression step could introduce stuttering. Those titles are few and far between, though.

Some of you may be scoffing at this article and pointing out that ever since Windows 10, the "compress" command supports LZX compression. But paying just $5.99/5.99€ for Game Compressor will save your time, add visibility into compression status, and automatically recompress patches. If you'd rather strike a middle ground, there's also the open-source CompressGUI — which is also pretty nifty, though not quite as feature-filled.

AGI is back with another drive, this time with one more oriented at budget shoppers who want different capacity options with a heatsink. The AI828 slots in somewhere between the AI818 – a drive that didn’t impress us at all – and the AI858, a drive that was surprisingly good. The AI828 is a “one size fits all” type of drive that can work in a desktop, the PS5 console, or in a laptop if you don’t use the included heatsink. It’s not the best choice for any of these, but beggars can’t be choosers in this market. After all, we have PCIe 3.0 drives returning and entry-level drives like the TeamGroup NV5000 showing up, as well. The AI828 can outdo those and some of our original PCIe 4.0 favorites like the TeamGroup MP44L. Just don’t expect miracles.

AGI AI828 Specifications

The AGI AI828 covers every capacity you could ever hope for: 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. Unfortunately, only 1TB and 2TB units were available at the time of review. These were going for $239.99 and $449.99 which is on the expensive side in both cases. Right now, however, this drive comes in and out of stock and can be priced competitively. It’ll probably be difficult to find the 8TB SKU, though.

The drive can hit up to 7,400 / 6,700 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, with no specification for IOPS given. IOPS tend not to be important for this segment – that is, a budget drive – and AGI is likely mixing multiple controllers and flash types based on availability and cost, which makes it less straightforward to try and nail down performance numbers. However, we would expect it to match the Seagate FireCuda X1070, with more than enough performance for this class.

AGI’s warranty covers the drive for the standard five years, with a bit extra on the writes front: the drive can absorb up to 750TB of data writes per TB capacity. The industry standard is 600TB. You probably won’t need this amount of writes, but it can be reassuring nonetheless, especially when dealing with less well-known brands and drives. It also suggests, but doesn’t guarantee, that TLC flash is used on the drive.

AGI AI828 Software and Accessories

AGI does not offer any substantial, direct software support. We recommend using CrystalDiskInfo for monitoring the health status of your drive. For basic benchmarking, CrystalDiskMark is a good choice. If you’re looking to backup data we suggest MultiDrive for windows and either Clonezilla or Rescuezilla for bootable options.

AGI AI828: A Closer Look

This is a single-sided drive that comes with an optional heatsink. This makes it great for the PS5 and many desktops, with the heatsink, and for laptops without. As this is intended to be a budget drive, that’s a bonus, as often there is no heatsink option. It’s best not to have to worry about a drive overheating in any circumstance, and the heatsink is sufficient for the job, but may not always be necessary.

The drive is pretty barebones with a DRAM-less SSD controller, two NAND flash packages, and a power management IC. As there is room for four flash packages, this drive could very well be single-sided at even high capacities. Not having a DRAM package helps. The PMIC is an Active-Semi or Qorvo part similar to what we’ve seen on some WD drives in the past. Power management can be handled this way, with discrete components, or as an embedded feature of the controller, each method with its own trade-offs.

The use of the PMIC makes sense when we look at the alignment of the drive: the controller is in the center. Leaving enough space for four NAND flash packages is ideal for a budget drive, and having the controller in the middle can be beneficial in some ways. We remember the WD Black having this configuration to help with cooling and to make even-length traces to the flash packages. Cooling is also aided as the heatsink can spread heat out to either side, with flash usually running cooler than the controller. This gives the center, hottest area of the drive a lot of heatsink surface area to dissipate heat before thermal equilibrium is attained.

As for traces, SSD controllers generally have to contend with timing issues to make sure all the flash operates in tandem, and even small differences can impact latency and, ultimately, drive efficiency. While we don’t think you should buy a drive based on this arrangement, it shows attention to detail on AGI’s part, even though that’s probably giving them too much credit with this being focused on the lowest possible BOM cost.

The flash is not directly identifiable through decoding or through utility use. We suspect the flash can vary on this drive, anyway, especially at different capacities. Examples we’ve seen have used TLC flash, and that matches the endurance rating of the drive. On the other hand, the Seagate X1070 with the same controller and TLC levels of TBW is using Micron’s 232-Layer QLC flash. Looking at the performance characteristics of the drive as a whole, we’re limited by the controller and relatively small capacities on hand. Usually, you will have TLC flash with smaller SKUs as it offers higher baseline performance, as historically, QLC flash dies have been denser, which means fewer dies. However, in this era of 1Tb dies for both TLC and QLC, this is less of a certainty.

The flash that can be paired with this drive is somewhat limited to newer generations due to the required I/O speed, but there is still enough variance – especially if you take flash quality into consideration – that nothing is guaranteed. This isn’t particular to this drive, especially in the current market where flash supply is limited. Still, we can be reasonably certain that it won’t be using “bad” flash, which puts it a cut above lower-end drives that are once again becoming common.

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Comparison Products

We’re pulling no punches. The AGI AI828 is going up against drives that can match or outclass it and are generally of a higher capacity. This puts the drive at a disadvantage, but we don’t really think it belongs in a lower class, either. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

The drive is up against some of the best DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve tested, with both TLC and QLC flash. These include the Crucial P310 with QLC, the Biwin Black Opal NV7400, the Addlink A93, the Inland TN470, and the WD Black SN7100 with TLC. The last one is using exceptional BiCS8 TLC, which has very low latency and very high power efficiency.

Drives that may be considered a step or half step lower include the Klevv CRAS C925 with different TLC flash, the Biwin NV7200 with QLC, and the Kingson NV3 with variable hardware. The AI828 is more of a match with these drives, but they are all tested at 2TB versus the 512GB and 1TB SKUs of the AI828. With fewer flash dies, the AI828 is at a disadvantage in some sequential workloads.

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.

The AI828 is at the bottom of the chart, but it's not as bad as it could be. Poor performance at 512GB is to be expected – remember that most of the comparison drives are 2TB or larger. Such a low capacity for the AI828 does not allow for optimal use of newer, denser flash. Even at 1TB, things are stretched a bit.

We recorded 53µs for latency in 3DMark for the 2TB Seagate X1070, which means the AI828 1TB’s result here is actually not that bad. 50µs is far from a good score, but it's good enough for gaming. 512GB probably isn’t enough space for a gaming drive, but the AI828’s other capacities would work. This is not our first choice for a gaming drive unless it’s the least expensive, but your experience in general will not suffer from using it.

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.

Things are significantly better in PCMark 10, which is not entirely surprising, as the flash compatible with this controller is likely to be newer. We want to point out that this doesn’t necessarily help us discern the flash in use. QLC flash, for its part, can have surprisingly good read performance because, for one, you can end up reading hot data from the pSLC cache, and two, QLC tends to be optimized for 4KB reads to compensate for the flash’s slower native speed. So the flash type is not always made clear through synthetic tests.

We consider ~45µs to be an ideal target for drive responsiveness, and both capacities of the drive hit this. We should add that 44µs is the same score we got on the 2TB X1070, so we see nothing unusual here. As always, a drive with BiCS8 TLC or QLC flash – that would be the Black SN7100 here – is optimal for the very lowest 4KB read latency. However, the AI828 is quite fast enough to serve as a primary drive or as the only drive in your system.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data, both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

Our main PS5 tests show no problems with the PS5. These would be the read test and the game transfer test from the M.2 SSD. The problem comes with the write test – game transfer test to M.2 SSD – where clearly the 512GB drive is not writing or not writing fully to the pSLC cache. Generally, this is not a problem in our testing because pSLC caches are large enough to handle even larger writes, plus drives have sufficient idle time to free up the cache. However, the cache size varies with capacity, so it is smaller at 512GB, and for drives using denser flash, especially that is going to be an issue.

This is not likely to be a real-world problem as a drive, and especially a PS5 drive, probably won’t be taxed this hard, and even if it is, the average speed here is still largely sufficient. This just demonstrates why smaller drives have gone away as the move to denser flash makes performance less consistent – even a 512GB drive lacks sufficient dies for optimal parallelization. In fact, it’s just one die per channel with 1Tb dies. On the other hand, SSD prices scale with flash, especially with the price hikes, which means lower-capacity drives are making a return. Unfortunately, that just doesn’t work well at this performance level. So you are left in a situation where you either have to make do with a much slower drive or spend enough money to get 1TB or more to make a faster drive worthwhile.

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 AGI reads data fine, but struggles a bit during write workloads. This impacts copy performance, as writes are more limited than reads. Write performance can be impacted by the size of the pSLC cache, but if that is not too small, then it is impacted by the amount of parallelization the drive achieves. Smaller drives have fewer flash dies, and therefore less parallelization, and as a result write more slowly, which in turn reduces copy performance. This means the 512GB AI828 struggles to match the larger drives in this list, although, actually, its performance is not terrible for a drive of its size.

When you double the number of dies, you can reach up to double the speed, and with half the dies, you might drop to half the speed. The 512GB SKU here manages to maintain 1.1 GB/s, which, for this type of workload, isn’t world-endingly bad.

The 1TB SKU also struggles against the larger drives. The only other 1TB drive, the TN470, is near the bottom of the list. The budget NV3 is about as fast as the 1TB AI828. So, we can be somewhat happy with the AI828’s result. We’d figure that with at least a slower controller, the AI828 is going to fall behind the TN470. That doesn’t change the fact that this drive should be at a discount as a result. We are merely saying that the performance here is not unexpected, although things should be better at 2TB.

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.

Fundamentally, we don’t see any issues with the AI828 in ATTO. The dips for 1KiB and 2KiB writes, for example, have little to no impact on real-world performance. This is not only because you mostly feel the reads with consumer workloads, but because writes are preferably combined into full 16KiB pages, and typically your logical page will be at 4KiB. Likewise, the dip for larger writes with the smaller 512GB SKU is expected because you lack sufficient dies for parallelization. This could be an issue if you intend to write or store larger files to the drive, but then a 512GB drive is probably not ideal. One exception might be if it’s used externally, in which case picking a heatsinked drive is odd, but even if that weren’t the case, the typical NVMe to USB enclosure is rated for a meager 10Gbps, anyway.

Read performance is more problematic. The 512GB SKU still has issues with larger I/O for the reason mentioned, although this begins at a smaller size. You will likely have files or blocks at 128 KiB or larger, and your performance may suffer from going with a smaller drive. The 1TB drive is better off except at 2MiB, where we have a dip. We’ve in the past hypothesized this could be a flash alignment issue, which would suggest this drive uses six-plane flash. With the 2,400 MT/s requirement here, that would mean 232-Layer YMTC or Micron TLC.

In CDM, we can move right over to sequential reads and writes to get a fuller idea of performance. For example, both capacities are fine with sufficient queue depth, but at queue depth 1 – which is a realistic workload for file transfers – the smaller 512GB model struggles. It’s still within striking distance of the 2TB NV3, which means it’s actually pretty good for a drive of its size. The 1TB drive has no issues at all. We see something similar with sequential writes, except that the 512GB SKU sees no performance improvement with queue depth. It simply doesn’t have enough flash to eke out more than ~4.1 GB/s.

With random 4KB operations, though, the amount of dies won’t matter at QD1. This is because you’re only hitting one die at any given time. As a result, both capacities have the same latency for both reads and writes. This isn’t always the case, as sometimes a large-capacity model might have more overhead, or you may see different hardware combinations at some capacities. However, in this case, both drives are dead even. While the 4KB write latency is fine, the 4KB read latency is not great. However, this is actually better than the X1070’s 55.44µs we got at 2TB and is better than any of the 5 GB/s budget, PCIe 4.0 SSDs we’ve tested.

Again, we consider ~45µs to be excellent, with ~50µs being a second dividing point. The AI828 is close enough to put it above last-generation drives, but it’s slow enough to be relegated to game duty. The exception would be if you really only need 512GB and have to save money any way you can. In that case, this drive is passable, as you might otherwise be looking at older PCIe 4.0 or even PCIe 3.0 drives. This one still feels more snappy than those. At higher capacities and on a tight budget, if you can find the drive at the right price, it could also work, but would not be our first choice.

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.

The AI828’s first, fastest mode in pSLC writes at ~6.4 GB/s for 51 seconds with a 328GB cache on the 1TB SKU. Given that this is almost one-third of the full capacity, we’re dealing with TLC flash. This is a large cache, which means the drive will struggle once it’s depleted. That is the case with the 1TB drive, averaging below 200 MB/s in the post-cache mode. This is very slow, HDD slow, and even QLC flash slow, but that is not completely unexpected. A modern 1TB drive does not have enough dies to hit a higher speed, and if the cache is very large, as is the case here, the trade-off is slow performance outside the cache. The good news is that the large cache hides this very well in 99% of real-world cases.

The 512GB SKU has even fewer dies, too few to really manage sustained writes very well. It’s better in a read-heavy role, but it's too small for large media. In many cases, you’re better off with an HDD in that case. If, however, you need a smaller option for a primary drive in, say, an older machine, this could do the trick. Older machines benefit greatly from going to an SSD – especially an NVMe SSD – and will usually be read-heavy or even read-exclusive. If you are intending to get a small, 512GB caching drive, this is certainly not the way to go.

We must admit that, in our testing, the smaller SKUs’ cache size is tiny. This is highly unusual and points to AGI using a static cache in that circumstance. Such a small cache means the drive can rebound better, even with half the interleaving or parallelization of the 1TB drive, so it scores higher in steady state write performance testing. The use of static pSLC makes sense here to improve post-cache performance and potentially also to improve flash endurance. Static pSLC can lead to lower effective write amplification if you’re not doing big writes, and it is still ample enough to cache potentially damaging random writes. So, it’s possible AGI is making the best of a bad situation.

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.

Power efficiency is rough on the AI828. We also saw this with the X1070, so it must be chalked up to the controller. We suspect it’s because our workload is hard on the drive, and this controller is not as strong. You will likely not have issues with everyday, read-heavy activities. Also, our idle testing is for desktops, and a laptop with proper power-saving states will not be in as bad a shape. That’s all to say that we don’t think these results preclude the drive’s use in a laptop because, frankly, this drive isn’t fast enough to be an issue in most cases. We might recommend a different drive like the Black SN7100 if you're aiming at power efficiency or want/need a cool-running option, though.

Speaking of the heatsink, it kept both drives at a maximum temperature of 54°C. This means plenty of headroom, and the drive should be suitable for any machine that can take it. It won’t overheat. That’s a bonus for PS5 usage because the thermal envelope can be tighter.

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.

AGI AI828 Bottom Line

The AGI AI828, like the Seagate X1070, is not a great drive, but it’s also not one to dismiss. Memory prices have risen greatly within the last year, which impacts SSD prices through NAND flash costs and, sometimes, DRAM costs as well. An SSD’s cost is derived almost entirely from the flash, in fact. We’ve seen budget drives return in force, and we’re seeing low-end PCIe 4.0 and even PCIe 3.0 drives coming back.

This is also a reality for volatile memory markets – DDR4 is coming back, there was a threat that included even DDR3, and, believe it or not, DDR2 prices are increasing as well – with no end in sight. To put it simply, the AI828 would not have gotten far a year or so ago, but in the current climate, it’s not too bad. We feel that Seagate did a better job of presenting and supporting its drive, and, simultaneously, we feel like AGI has made improvements in its SSDs, so our score falls somewhere in between.

Let’s start with the good. AGI offers a wide capacity range for the drive, which is good for people who need 512GB or, theoretically, 8TB at a lower price. We think 8TB luxury buyers might opt for a faster drive like the Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 8100, WD Black SN8100, or Samsung 9100 Pro, or frankly, the less-expensive WD Black SN850X. The lower-end 512GB version of the AI828 perhaps makes more sense, but that’s one area where older technology might make sense. Newer flash is more dense and so really prefers higher capacities. On the other hand, the AI828 is more responsive than older drives, which is probably more important from a user experience perspective. So, despite some of the bad results, the fact that it’s using newer hardware is a bonus.

The drive also comes with a heatsink and runs pretty cool. It should be great for a normal desktop or in a PS5. It’s not very efficient, but that generally doesn’t matter in these two scenarios. Certainly not in most desktops, although there are exceptions. If you do have proper power-saving, it should be fine, though. The drive is designed to pull 5.5W or less at peak, which frankly isn’t concerning. So, we’re willing to give it a pass on the power side, although there are better options for laptops. One thing we have to mention again is that smaller SKUs don’t perform as well, and, since we’re testing at 512GB and 1TB today, the AI828 looks worse than it is. Most of the competition is sitting at 2TB because that was the sweet spot back when prices were sane.

It’s still hard to love the performance on this one. Like the X1070, which uses QLC flash, things are inconsistent across our benchmarks with relatively poor results on the whole. We opted not to put this one up against older or slower drives, even though some of those are making a comeback. The fact is, this drive will beat PCIe 3.0 and many lower-end PCIe 4.0 options and really shouldn’t be compared to those. You’re probably better off going with its newer tech unless budget is your only priority. Against other PCIe 4.0 drives in this range, however, even adjusting for capacity, it’s going to struggle. This drive has to be priced inexpensively to make sense, and if it is, we can recommend it for lighter duty.

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Nowadays, storage devices for consumer and data center applications differ rather dramatically, as do approaches to product design as well as go-to-market strategies. Therefore, to get a more or less comprehensive overview of the storage market in general, you must observe both ends of the spectrum. To complement our interview with Nelson Duann at Computex, we also sat down with his colleague Alex Chou, who is in charge of Silicon Motion’s enterprise storage business.

Alex Chou is an interesting person to talk to. Before joining Silicon Motion, he spent some 18 years at Broadcom, where he led the wireless connectivity business, also initiating the Enterprise Switch, PoE, and 10-G Base-T PHY business with a product marketing focus. Before that, he worked at UMC Capital, ARK Logic, and Western Digital, where he developed graphics accelerators. He deeply understands the industry and uses his knowledge to expand SMI's business into the data center segment. As he is the first general manager of Silicon Motion's enterprise business unit, it is safe to say that all the success that the company has faced in the new segment so far can be attributed to Alex Chou.

Anton Shilov: Can you introduce yourself to our readers, please?

Alex Chou: My name is Alex Chou. As you know, Silicon Motion has two business units: the client business and the enterprise business. I am responsible for the enterprise business unit. My responsibilities include defining new products, leading development teams, bringing products to market, and working with OEMs, cloud service providers, and other customers to promote our technology and differentiation.

Getting into enterprise SSD business

Historically, Silicon Motion was focused on NAND controllers for client applications as well as embedded graphics processors and USB display controllers. Following the restructuring in the early 2020s, SMI formed a separate business unit to offer enterprise-grade SSD controllers, though it took the company some time to land its first tangible orders. By now, the company has yet to grab a 10% market share, yet it has clients among cloud service providers (CSPs), hyperscalers, and OEMs, significant achievements given Silicon Motion is a relatively new market entrant.

Anton Shilov: It has been a challenging year for much of the industry, particularly for memory-related segments. Yet Silicon Motion reported first-quarter revenue of $342.1 million, up 23% sequentially and 105% year-over-year, while SSD controller sales increased by roughly 40% to 45%. Can you explain what drove those results, particularly on the enterprise side?

Alex Chou: It depends on how you define a difficult year. If you look at the results, I would argue that this has actually been one of the best years the storage industry has seen.

Silicon Motion is fundamentally a controller company. We build controllers that work with NAND from all major memory suppliers. On the enterprise side, we are still relatively new compared to some established competitors, but we have secured a number of new projects and have started delivering products to customers.

We have invested heavily in PCIe Gen5, Gen6, and Gen7 enterprise SSD controllers. Today, our Gen5 products are beginning to ramp into volume production with multiple OEM customers. That ramp is contributing to our growth.

Anton Shilov: Do you have an estimate of your market share in the enterprise SSD controller market?

Alex Chou: That depends on how you define the market. Some people measure market share by unit shipments, while others look at exabytes shipped because SSD capacities continue to increase.

We have only recently begun shipping enterprise products in volume. If you listened to our CEO's comments during the earnings call, we expect enterprise shipments to increase significantly in the second half of the year. We are still in the early stages of our ramp, but we are making good progress with several key customers.

If you look beyond the initial ramp and think about the full-year run rate, I believe we can build from there and target a much stronger position next year. Longer term, our goal is to exceed 10% market share in the $4B enterprise SSD controller market, but this year is really about getting through qualification, customer testing, and the early production ramp in 2 half of this year.

Our goal is to continue expanding our share. We are only beginning the ramp [of our data center-grade SSD controllers] today, but we expect our share to increase meaningfully as deployments grow.

Anton Shilov: Who are your primary customers? SSD manufacturers, OEMs, or hyperscalers?

Alex Chou: We primarily work with OEMs. We sell controllers and firmware solutions to SSD manufacturers and OEMs. Some customers use our complete controller-and-firmware solution, while others develop their own firmware.

At the same time, we work directly with hyperscalers and cloud service providers to explain the advantages of our products and ensure they understand our technology roadmap.

Enterprise SSDs are used in several different segments. Traditional compute servers represent one market. High-density storage systems used for AI and large-scale data storage are another. We also see growing interest in storage systems located near GPUs, where latency becomes particularly important.

One area where we differentiate ourselves is quality of service. We have developed a patented traffic-shaping engine that helps maintain latency consistency under heavy workloads and multi-tenant environments. That capability is particularly attractive to hyperscalers and cloud service providers.

Anton Shilov: Do you see the enterprise SSD market splitting into different categories depending on workload?

Alex Chou: Yes. We see at least three major categories emerging.

The first is traditional compute-attached enterprise SSDs, which are used in conventional servers and storage systems. The second is very high-density storage for AI and hyperscale environments, where capacity, throughput, and cost efficiency are critical. The third is storage located closer to GPUs, where the requirements are very different because latency and quality of service become much more important.

That third category is particularly interesting. In AI systems, the storage subsystem is no longer just feeding CPUs. It increasingly has to support GPUs directly, especially for workloads involving very large datasets or KV-cache offload. In those environments, low latency and predictable performance matter much more than they did in traditional storage deployments.

Storage Next, PCIe 6 and PCIe 7 SSD controllers

Anton Shilov: Is that where Nvidia's Storage Next vision comes in?

Alex Chou: Yes. Storage Next is one of the major industry developments we are watching very closely.

The idea is that storage will move closer to the GPU and become part of a much more tightly integrated data path. In some cases, the goal is not just to maximize bandwidth, but to ensure that latency remains low and deterministic enough for AI workloads that continuously move data between accelerators, system memory, and storage.

This is one of the reasons we have invested heavily in QoS and latency control. Through our traffic-shaping technology, we can manage access patterns and reduce latency spikes when multiple tenants or applications share the same SSD. In a cloud environment or an AI storage environment, that becomes very important.

Anton Shilov: So, the challenge is no longer just raw throughput, but how predictably the SSD behaves under load?

Alex Chou: Exactly. Bandwidth still matters, but in many enterprise and AI environments, consistency matters just as much.

When multiple applications, multiple VMs, or multiple users share the same storage device, you need to control latency and quality of service carefully. If performance becomes unpredictable, it can affect the entire system.

That is why we have focused on a traffic-shaping mechanism that can prioritize and isolate workloads more effectively. We believe that kind of latency management will become a key differentiator for enterprise SSD controllers going forward.

Anton Shilov: How does that affect your roadmap for future controllers?

Alex Chou: It affects it quite a bit. Our upcoming controllers are not designed only for higher sequential bandwidth. They are also being designed for newer enterprise requirements such as OCP 2.7 compliance, stronger security, better QoS, and support for more advanced deployment models.

Anton Shilov: Are you already sampling your PCIe 6.x controllers?

Alex Chou: On the Gen6 side, our controller design is essentially complete; we have an FPGA [emulating algorithms], and we expect tape-out very soon. If everything goes according to plan, we expect first silicon back in the second half of 2026.

That controller not only supports a faster host interface, but also supports new features and requirements we see from AI infrastructure and hyperscale customers.

Anton Shilov: So, the PCIe Gen6 SSD platform is not just a speed upgrade for Silicon Motion?

Alex Chou: Correct. PCIe Gen6 obviously provides more bandwidth, but for us the more important part is that the surrounding system requirements are changing as well. Security, QoS, cloud deployment models, and AI storage architectures are all evolving at the same time, so the controller has to evolve with them.

Anton Shilov: Let us talk about the roadmap in more detail. You said the PCIe Gen6 enterprise controller is close to tape-out. What comes after that?

Alex Chou: PCIe Gen6 is the next major step for us, and the design is essentially complete. We expect to tape out very soon and, assuming [everything works correctly], receive first silicon in the second half of 2026.

But internally, we are already working beyond PCIe Gen6. PCIe Gen7 development has already started. In fact, the overall architecture for our Gen7 enterprise controller platform has already been defined. That means we are not just planning the interface speed increase; we are also defining the surrounding architecture, feature set, and deployment model that will be needed in the next generation of enterprise and AI systems.

Anton Shilov: So, SMI's PCIe Gen7 controller is no longer just a concept?

Alex Chou: Correct. PCIe Gen7 is already in active development. The current plan is to have internal samples in 2H, 2027 and to move toward production in that same general timeframe.

As controller development becomes more complex, you cannot wait until the market is ready before starting work. By the time a new interface reaches the market, the controller has to be nearly finished already. So, we are always working at least one generation ahead, and in practice often two.

Anton Shilov: As NAND becomes denser and more complex, error correction also becomes a bigger issue?

Alex Chou: That is a major part of controller development now. As NAND moves to higher layer counts and denser cell structures, the controller has to do more work to maintain reliability, endurance, and data integrity.

One of the areas we are working on is stronger LDPC. On the enterprise side, LDPC with a 16KB collaborative codeword is already used with SM8466, SMI’s first Enterprise PCIe Gen6 controller, and it is part of the roadmap because future NAND will require more robust error correction. That is one of the reasons enterprise controller architecture keeps becoming more complex generation after generation. You are no longer designing only for interface speed. You are also designing for signal integrity, power, security, QoS, error correction, and support for future NAND generations that may behave very differently from today's devices.

Anton Shilov: Will LDPC with 16KB collaborative codeword be enough for next generations of 3D NAND with hundreds of active layers?

Alex Chou: A 16KB LDPC engine already consumes a significant amount of silicon area and is quite sophisticated. For PCIe Gen7 controllers, our goal is to optimize and improve that engine from multiple angles rather than simply keep expanding it. We still need our architects to make the final call on exactly which improvements we will implement, but at this point we are more likely to refine and enhance the current design than to move beyond 16KB LDPC.

SSD controller development strategy

Anton Shilov: Speaking more generally, SSD controllers are increasingly becoming full platforms rather than just controllers, because integration matters so much. Do you expect close collaboration between controller vendors, NAND makers, and SSD manufacturers to become even more important as the industry moves to next-generation storage devices?

Alex Chou: I may not fully understand your question, but let me explain how we approach it.

At Silicon Motion, we design the controller architecture and build the firmware stack with a rich feature set. For example, we have developed our own [PerformaShape] traffic-shaping engine to improve QoS. That is the foundation of the platform.

From there, we have to look at how NAND evolves from one generation to the next. As we move from PCIe Gen5 to Gen6 to Gen7, controller performance has to scale accordingly. If you want to saturate the PCIe interface and deliver, say, 7 million IOPS today and much higher performance in future generations, you have to understand exactly where NAND is going.

That is why my team meets regularly with Samsung, SK hynix, SanDisk, Kioxia, and all other NAND vendors to review their roadmaps. Silicon Motion is part of that ecosystem, and because of those relationships, we usually get early visibility into future NAND generations and often receive early samples so we can bring up our controllers and make sure they take advantage of new NAND as quickly as possible.

That matters even more in the current supply environment. Because we work with all NAND suppliers, hyperscalers and cloud service providers can come to us and ask for a solution that is not tied to a single memory vendor. A company like Samsung naturally builds around its own NAND, but we have the advantage of being able to support multiple suppliers. That gives customers much more flexibility when supply is tight.

So yes, we have a core controller architecture and a common firmware base, but one of our strengths is that we work very closely with NAND vendors on future generations and make sure our platform can take advantage of faster interfaces, higher die counts, and new NAND capabilities as they arrive.

XL-Flash and storage-class memory

Anton Shilov: What about storage-class memory? Are there any developments there? As far as I can tell, adoption of Kioxia’s XL-Flash has been limited.

Alex Chou: That’s a very good question. I am actually going to visit Kioxia, so I should have a better sense of their plans after that. At the moment, Kioxia is essentially the only company still pushing XL-Flash, so they are trying to build something around it.

The challenge is that it is not just about the technology itself. You need a broader ecosystem to support it, and that is what makes the situation more complicated. We are watching it closely and trying to understand whether it is something we really need to support, but at this point I do not have a definitive answer. We are still evaluating it.

Anton Shilov: Have you heard anything similar from other suppliers? Quite a few memory makers used to talk about storage-class memory or similar technologies in their roadmaps.

Alex Chou: Based on what we know, not really. If you look back at last year’s Flash Memory Summit, several NAND makers were talking about higher-performance flash and storage-class-memory-like concepts. That created a lot of buzz at the time, and we looked into it, just as we have looked into XL-Flash, to understand whether there was a real ecosystem forming around it.

But there is much less discussion around those ideas now. One reason is simple: memory vendors do not really need those products at the moment because they can sell conventional NAND at very high prices and still generate strong returns.

Anton Shilov: In other words, they can just sell QLC 3D NAND and be perfectly happy.

Alex Chou: Exactly.

Anton Shilov: On the other hand, Nvidia wants storage devices capable of 100 million IOPS.

Alex Chou: Yes, that is where Storage Next comes in.

Anton Shilov: Has anyone actually come close to 100 million IOPS yet?

Alex Chou: I would say Storage Next gains many attentions. XL-Flash could be one possible approach to address that kind of requirement. But these are other options aiming to address high-performance and low latency needs.

What matters more is that Storage Next has a much stronger ecosystem behind it because Nvidia is actively driving it. There are regular meetings around it, and our architect has been involved from the very beginning. We have been tracking it closely and trying to make sure our future controller architecture can support it if and when the market materializes.

At the same time, Nvidia itself appears to recognize that 100 million or 200 million IOPS may not be realistic in the near term. The target seems to be moving closer to something like 50 million IOPS, which is more achievable. So yes, we are watching it very closely, and we are building in the flexibility to support it if needed.

In storage, having a technically interesting idea is not enough. The industry has to agree on how to use it, how to deploy it, and how to integrate it into systems. Storage Next currently has more momentum because the ecosystem behind it is much stronger.

Anton Shilov: So, you see Storage Next as more commercially relevant than storage-class memory, at least for now?

Alex Chou: Yes. At least today, Storage Next looks more immediate and more actionable.

We are already participating in those discussions and thinking about what future controller requirements will look like in that environment. That includes not only bandwidth, but also latency behavior, QoS, and the role storage plays in systems where GPUs are increasingly central to the data path.

That does not mean other technologies disappear. It just means that if you ask where the market is actively moving right now, the answer is much more on the Storage Next side than on the storage-class-memory side.

Anton Shilov: So, in practice, you make sure your controller works with all relevant NAND types, while the memory vendor mainly has to make sure the media itself complies with the interface requirements?

Alex Chou: When we design a controller, we already cooperate closely with NAND suppliers. Our architects look at all of the major vendors to understand whether there are any special requirements we need to account for. Then we handle another layer of optimization in firmware to make sure we can support all of those devices properly.

If you look deeper into enterprise NAND, most products also use interface chips internally to connect large numbers of dies. Those interface chips can differ from vendor to vendor, so we need to understand their configurations as well, including die counts, planes, and other architectural details. The goal is to make sure the controller and firmware together can support all of those different combinations.

So far, our architecture has been able to support NAND from SanDisk, Kioxia, SK hynix, and the other major vendors. Even if the interface chips differ, we try to keep the overall hardware design as flexible as possible.

There are really three elements involved: the controller itself, the hardware board, and the firmware. Ideally, you do not want a completely different board design for every NAND supplier. Fortunately, the industry has standardized a lot of the pinouts and module interfaces, which makes it possible to use a common hardware design and swap in NAND from different suppliers with the right firmware support.

We spend a lot of time making sure we can support all of those different combinations.

Anton Shilov: So you are effectively building controllers with a fairly clear view of what future NAND generations will look like.

Alex Chou: Exactly. We want to make sure that when the next generation of NAND arrives, we are ready to support it as broadly as possible.

Samsung is back with another solid-state drive, and this time it's something a little bit different. The 990 is a QLC-based 990 EVO Plus, positioned as a budget drive that can still push a lot of bandwidth. It’s a little late to the game and not quite what was rumored for the 990 QVO, but it does bring some new technology to the table. We’re always interested in seeing what Samsung puts out, and this time is no different. It should not be confused as being part of Samsung’s Pro line or, for that matter, the EVO line, so keep that in mind.

The drive has its ups and downs, but in this challenging market, and for a budget drive, that’s to be expected. Samsung is still well-regarded for its name and reliable hardware, even as there has been a massive push towards enterprise, away from the consumer side. Samsung has, in fact, given some ground in the SSD space for many years, even as it produces some of the most common OEM drives. So while this is not a Crucial situation, it’s best to jump into this review with the right expectations about what this drive is and isn’t. It’s a budget drive with full Gen 4 throughput that hits the most common capacities with sufficient performance and power efficiency. It’s not meant to be a throne-taker.

It’s also thankfully not another 990 EVO situation – that drive felt somewhat underwhelming by the time it arrived, even when pitted against budget drives – but the 990 is also not a QLC rallying call. It’s a competent drive that mostly hits the right notes, as intended. Given how scarce Samsung QLC drives have been, and how much demand its QLC flash surely has elsewhere, it can feel like Samsung is throwing consumers a bone, though it would be crass to put it that way. We instead think this is smart positioning by the company as it knows the future is with QLC and the technologies used in this flash (even if first shown two years ago at ISSCC) point firmly at an ambitious future. The 990 just lets you own a piece of that.

Samsung 990 Specifications

The Samsung 990 is only available at 1TB and 2TB capacities, with MSRPs of $269.99 and $529.99, respectively. These prices are very high, as you can get competing drives like the Crucial P310 for substantially less, and in fact even the TLC-based WD Black SN7100 costs less. But Samsung has historically launched with MSRPs well above actual market price. You should be able to get the drive at significantly lower prices after launch, but the “Samsung tax” may still apply. We’ll get into what that means throughout the review.

This limited capacity range is unfortunate, but enables Samsung to pack the flash into just one package, which reduces PCB space so that any OEM variant can be used in multiple M.2 form factors and will always be single-sided. Less than 1TB is also not enough for these denser dies if you want good performance. That leaves 1TB and 2TB as the target capacities, which also makes sense in a market where 4TB+ is getting exceptionally expensive. We’ll eventually see 2Tb dies to make single-package 4TB a reality, but that’s further along in Samsung’s roadmap.

The drive can reach 7,250 / 6,450 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 850K / 1,200K random read and write IOPS. Peak performance is attained at 2TB, where you have the optimal amount of interleaving or parallelization: Sixteen 1Tb dies means four dies for each of four flash channels, the typical ceiling. However, as these are four-plane dies, you still get 32-way interleaving at 1TB with eight dies, which is enough to get good performance with just two dies per channel. Less than that is much less ideal, and more than that introduces additional overhead, especially for budget controllers. The math changes with six-plane and 2TB dies, but for this flash, 1TB is the reasonable minimum, with 2TB offering the best performance.

The drive is rated for approximately 4W of power draw across the two capacities, when looking at both reads and writes. Check our power results below to see how accurate that is. The drive is rated for 400TB of writes per TB capacity, which is high for QLC flash – we would typically see maybe 300TB, which is one-half of the TLC standard – but also indicates a very high drive writes per day (DWPD) rating. This is due to the warranty only covering three years rather than the normal five, so the amount of writes per year is significantly higher. This is atypical, so requires further explanation.

For those who live for TBW and write endurance, this illustrates why TBW often looks better on paper. Spreading 400TB over three years works out to roughly double the daily write allowance of a typical 300TBW / five-year QLC drive. Most people will never approach either number, and they will live with the shorter coverage window. However, if you intend to hammer the drive with writes to the point of exceeding TBW within the three-year warranty period, then this could be good. Although you really shouldn't use a budget DRAM-less QLC-based drive for that type of workload. However, that option exists and is rarely the case with a QLC-based drive. As a final note, the drive does support TCG Opal 2.0 for encryption.

Samsung 990 Software and Accessories

Samsung’s Magician software is the gold standard for consumer SSDs. This is an SSD toolbox with all the features you need. It displays system and drive health information, including SMART, and checks whether your drive is legitimate. You can also benchmark your drive and use any optional features, such as encryption. The software is also essential for keeping the drive’s firmware up to date, although you can also download that from the first link.

Samsung 990: A Closer Look

The 990 has an SSD controller, a single NAND flash package, and power management circuitry. There is no DRAM package present. This is a single-sided drive, which is ideal for compatibility and cooling. There is a lot of free space on the PCB, and by putting distance between the controller and flash, there is separation to mitigate component heat generation. This would also help if a heatspreader or heatsink were to be added. Without this space, the drive could be sold in a shorter form factor, which is particularly useful for OEM drives.

The label has information about the drive, such as the date of manufacture (DOM), model, serial, the PSID, and the power rating. We always caution that you not take certain drive information as being conclusive about the hardware. For example, you should not assume TLC or QLC flash from a drive’s TBW. Likewise, you shouldn’t rely on the labeled power rating – and this is done more often on M.2 2230 drives for portable devices – as any indication of drive power efficiency. Here we have 3.3V / 1.85A, which indicates potential power draw over 6W. Now, the power ratings given on spec sheets will often be average and not peak, and will be separated as read or write rather than mixed. In fact, this drive’s load power states can reach a peak of 5.90W via SMART, which is much above the rated average ~4W. We track both peak and average in our testing.

We always enjoy reviewing Samsung drives with a focus on the technicals, as the manufacturer remains a leader in many ways. The 990, in particular, requires some extra description to be fully appreciated. Simply looking at the benchmark results might make the technology seem underwhelming – to be honest, this is very much a budget drive, even taken in the best light – but that doesn’t mean Samsung phoned this one in. In fact, there are signs of deliberate design here, and some of the decisions could help sell this drive. Samsung still has to get the pricing right, of course, but what else is new?

Let’s start with the controller. The 990 is using the PiccoloQ, which is the QLC flash version of the Piccolo. The Piccolo is utilized on the 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus, two TLC-based drives. In all cases, it’s a four-channel, DRAM-less design, which limits performance and capacity. In both cases, the controller takes up to 2,400 MT/s flash – this is more than enough to saturate PCIe 4.0 – and the interior design is the same. This means it’s a Samsung 5nm part with multiple ARM Cortex-R8 cores and a single R5 core. If the Piccolo stands out in any way, it’s that it offers a PCIe 5.0 x2 option in addition to the standard 4.0 x4 interface. This option or mode has limited usefulness, though, and nothing in the 990 would change that if enabled for the PiccoloQ.

So, not much new on the controller front, but the use of this controller at the 990’s rated speeds does give us some more information. Namely, we know the 990 EVO runs more slowly because it’s using flash slower than 2,400 MT/s, 1,600 MT/s Samsung V6P TLC, to be precise. If we look at Samsung’s V7 QLC flash, it can run at that same speed. This is why the originally speculated 990 QVO with that flash was targeted at the same speeds as the 990 EVO. Things have changed since then. This drive could have been the 990 QVO, but with the EVO and EVO Plus lines going DRAM-less this generation, we suspect the QVO tier was “promoted” to the plain 990 name, and the 990 now targets the 990 EVO Plus's specs

The evidence to back this up, which also supports the loose 990 QVO rumor, is that Samsung does have a V7 QLC OEM drive: the BM9C1. This is the cousin to the PM9C1 line with OEM 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus (PM9C1b) variants. The BM9C1 is available down to M.2 2230 and uses the same PiccoloQ as the 990 (the QLC version of the 990 EVO/EVO Plus’s Piccolo). It’s just limited to the same speeds as the 990 EVO, as it’s running at 1,600 MT/s. We have to be careful here, though, as Samsung’s V9 QLC press release indicates a 60% I/O improvement, which, with the V9 being 3,200 MT/s, suggests a 2,000 MT/s ceiling for the V7 QLC. Since there is an OEM TLC-based drive in between the 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus (the PM9C1a) at 2,000 MT/s, the possibility for a ~6 GB/s 990 or 990 QVO with V7 QLC existed.

Before we dive more deeply into the flash, since we haven’t seen the new Samsung QLC in a while and there is some neat tech here, let’s decode the module. “K9” tells us it’s Samsung NAND flash memory. “YYG” indicates it’s a QLC flash package with sixteen dies (HDP) in a 2TB configuration, which confirms 1Tb dies. “Y8” means it’s 8-bit, J tells us the voltage, “5” tells us the number of chips enabled and ready/busy signals, and “D” tells us the generation. With V7 being “C” and V8 skipped, this suggests V9. The second part of the code tells us how the flash is packaged and that it’s commercial / consumer-grade. While you aren’t expected to know how to read codes on your SSD, knowing how it works can be useful, especially with Samsung drives, even if it’s just a matter of trying to figure out if you have a counterfeit product.

So let’s talk about the flash. This is a 286-Layer part, technically, but is sold as 280-Layer once accounting for source/ground and dummy lines. Dummy lines are usually at stack edges, as the physics of flash can make these lines otherwise unusable. A higher layer count – Samsung’s V7 is only 176-Layer, although technically 191 layers – generally means higher bit density. Bit density is key to scaling NAND flash, which is acting as capacious, non-volatile storage media. This can be disappointing to some because it means you don’t always see any real performance scaling as the layer count progresses.

Fitting more flash into the same space can mean less room for charge in each cell, which makes it harder to optimize for performance if you’re trying to maintain the same endurance level. That is certainly the case with this flash, as the performance only manages to match that of last-generation 176-Layer QLC flash from competitors, which is why we want to go out of our way to point out Samsung’s design decisions and why it leans innovative in ways you won’t see in, say, your game load times.

For one, when we talk about the layer count difference – reported versus actual – you also get an efficiency number that is the ratio between usable and total word lines. Samsung is a leader here, with high layer efficiency. Samsung also has held off using three decks or stacks of flash and is still at two, due to having superior channel etching – it’s able to drill down more layers with a higher aspect ratio. It’s also possible to run lines through the flash itself rather than rely largely on masked steps, which sets the stage for Samsung scaling to extremely high layer counts. One issue with high layer counts is that you start losing uniformity from layer to layer, and Samsung accounts for this with optimized word line spacing, too. So, as we’ve said in the past, it often feels like Samsung is falling behind on layer count, but in reality it has a very focused strategy and the best technology in the business, and we can see this with the 990’s flash.

For the consumer, though, the 990 is a little bit weird. This is presumably 3,200 MT/s flash that is being “wasted” with a 2,400 MT/s controller. This flash has amazing bit density, but having a single sixteen-die package at 2TB is nothing new. What about performance? Samsung has made optimizations to improve performance on this flash, but nothing amazing. This QLC is only comparable to the competition in performance terms, particularly at 2,400 MT/s. Samsung is playing catch-up, but we also think this is a case of designing for enterprise rather than consumer.

QLC flash is now highly sought after in enterprise for its density, and Samsung’s optimizations all benefit that kind of environment. In fact, from a consumer’s perspective you could look at this V9 QLC as being focused on higher bit density – but no 2Tb dies – and you would largely be correct. Samsung’s V9 QLC is 86% more dense generationally and about 94% more dense than the competition’s 176-Layer QLC flash.

We’ll take a look at one new technology in the V9 QLC flash to illustrate. One important consideration is flash power interruption leading to data loss, which, without power loss protection (PLP) means you are looking at protecting data at rest. This is on the non-volatile media or flash, not the volatile memory like DRAM. When folding from the pSLC cache to the native flash, data loss is not an issue because you don’t invalidate the original pSLC copy until the write has been verified. However, when writing to native QLC, you are writing multiple pages where the upper pages will require higher levels of sensitivity for proper reading. There are different methods of writing to QLC flash, but generally multi-bit flash has multiple write passes that go from fuzzy (coarse) to precise (fine), and lower pages write faster and may be complete first. Therefore, it’s important not to ruin existing lower-page data if you lose power while still adjusting voltage for the upper pages.

Micron has a unique way of dealing with this using a differential engine that can predict values from partial shifts, but a more common method is simply to back up or buffer the values in nonvolatile flash. QLC stores four bits per cell, so a full backup means writing four bits of pSLC per cell. pSLC is used because its writes are fast, whereas QLC's upper-page writes, in particular, are an order of magnitude slower. Samsung reduces the buffer to a single parity bit by using an odd/even algorithm, creating a sensing window that’s more like TLC (8-state) than QLC (16-state). This improves performance, endurance, and bit density. Some of that performance is still lost for higher bit density. For consumers, the direct benefit is higher TBW, but we speculate the higher density is aimed more at enterprise and future flash generation products. This is in part a response to Solidigm’s floating-gate design, a different technology than charge trap, with tighter charge placement.

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Comparison Products

The Samsung 990 enters a crowded market with a lot of good options, at least in theory. If we’re looking at QLC-based drives, this means the Crucial P310 and Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 at the very top. Both of these drives perform incredibly well. Below that, we have the older wave of drives represented by the TeamGroup MP44Q. That drive in particular remains a budget favorite with a fast controller and good QLC flash.

We would put the rest below that, even though the hardware is not always worse. This would include the Biwin M350, the Kingston NV3, and the Seagate FireCuda X1070. These drives are using alternative controllers – SMI, SMI, and TenaFe, respectively – that are roughly comparable, and the flash is not particularly old, either. However, these drives tend to be more budget-focused with reduced performance and (ideally) reduced cost.

We’ve also thrown in Samsung’s 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus for comparison. The 990 should be closer to the latter, but with QLC flash, it would be okay landing somewhere in between. On the whole, we would expect the drive also to be between the two main categories of drives – that is, above the budget ones, below the two fastest, and closer to the middle MP44Q and its MAP1602-equipped alternatives, but with Samsung’s name recognition. The technology is here to make this a reliable drive, which is also a factor to consider, but being this late to the game puts the 990 at a general disadvantage.

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.

We start by looking at 3DMark because, frankly, QLC-based drives make a lot of sense for gaming. Aside from large installs and updates, you’re mostly doing reads, which do not favor TLC drives as much. While it’s true that QLC flash is still slower, often-accessed data might be left in the pSLC cache – if you leave enough space free – and QLC is also optimized for random reads. Games do involve a lot of sequential reads and often at larger block sizes than you’d expect, but as long as the drive has sufficient interleaving (it’s sufficiently large) you are going to get pretty good performance.

For 3DMark, which is a synthetic test, we might expect the drives to perform as they do under ideal, cached circumstances. This means the 990 should perform closely to the 990 EVO Plus and better than the 990 EVO, even though both of those latter two are TLC-based. It does. The 990 gets pretty close to the P310, which is one of the best QLC drives out there, aside from the Blue SN5100. We tend to look at ~45µs as a good cutoff point for all-around performance – gaming doesn’t need to be super responsive – which is roughly around the popular budget NV3. The 990 is significantly faster than that, which is all you could ask for here.

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.

PCMark 10 performance usually, but not always, follows 3DMark. There is speculation that some drives or firmware may be optimized for benchmarks like PCMark 10, but taken within a greater suite of tests it’s still useful to get a feel for application performance. For us, that means for a primary drive – your boot or OS drive where your apps live – or for your everything drive, if you work and game on a single drive in your system. This isn’t too unusual with laptops where M.2 slots are limited.

The 990 again ends up roughly where we’d expect – above the 990 EVO, and close to the 990 EVO Plus. It’s not on the level of the P310 or Blue SN5100, but it’s clearly above the budget drives. This is a strong result with good latency. For instance, we would take the 990 over the NV3 any day, every day. On the other hand, the P310 and Blue SN5100 are frankly better drives. These two drives are better optimized and performance-oriented. The 990 is more of a gap filler that’s late to the scene.

We have to say, though, that we’re glad Samsung didn’t push out a 990 QVO that was more like the 990 EVO, even if it would have arrived earlier. Such a drive would have used older QLC flash and performed more slowly simply due to the lower interface speed.And frankly we’d rather have density-optimized flash that can run at the 990 EVO Plus level. That’s what the 990 delivers, even if it feels a little underwhelming. However, it makes perfect sense given the current market, enterprise demand, OEM demand, etc. The drive is still very fast and of a superior quality to a great many budget drives out there, and that makes it worthwhile.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data, both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

You know our PlayStation 5 line by now: just about any drive will do. The 990 can push more bandwidth than the 990 EVO, which arguably makes it a better pick. It’s on par with, or better than, most budget drives out there. At least, for the things you will usually be doing on the PS5. It’s clear from our one bandwidth test that the drive ran out of cache, and it has the typical slow QLC flash write state. This is not indicative of real-world performance if you do normal installs/updates with mostly reads. If you are freshly installing the drive and moving a ton of games onto it, then yes, this could be an issue, but the QLC write speeds are still significantly faster than 1GbE if you’re intending only to download a ton of games at once. Otherwise, you can check the cache size in the relevant testing section.

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.

We also see some write performance issues in DiskBench. This is dependent on cache size and speed, but for the most part should be limited by the interface speed. However, there are cases where copy speed will simply be slower, whether due to the controller or other optimization trade-offs. We can see that the 990 EVO, with TLC flash, is not exactly doing great here, and the 990 EVO Plus does much better. However, the 990 lags behind, and is very far behind the P310 and Blue SN5100.

So, we can put some of this slow speed on the Piccolo/PiccoloQ controller. To avoid getting too technical on this, we suspect it is partially architectural. This is reflected in power efficiency, as both the P310 and Blue SN5100 – with the Phison E27T and a proprietary Sandisk controller, respectively – are significantly more power-efficient than the 990 EVO, 990 EVO Plus, and as we’ll discover, the 990 as well. We also know that Samsung’s V9 QLC flash is not particularly inefficient.

As for the controller, there are reasons to design it differently. Reliability is one reason, especially if you sell a lot of OEM and enterprise drives that share the technology. Scaling is another, as you may use similar technology across your stack. You might want to optimize for a different sort of performance baseline; you may have unique endurance requirements, and you also might have to keep capacity in mind – enterprise drives, in particular, could make better use of this flash’s interface speed when scaling for capacity. Therefore, DiskBench results for our specific testing may not really be what Samsung is optimizing for, in which case the 990’s performance more or less hits expectations based on the 990 EVO and 990 EVO Plus. It just disappoints against drives like the NV3, which are otherwise inferior.

And to put a cap on it, yes, this is a consumer drive, but if you go back and read our 990 EVO review – and other recent Samsung SSD reviews, for that matter – you will see we underlined the idea that Samsung has been late to the party with less-than-leading performance recently. The fact is, Samsung has and has had bigger fish to fry, and its technology is sound but no longer looks amazing on the standard consumer benchmarks. That makes its products less relevant if you just want the fastest drive, although we’d argue there are secondary effects like drive reliability that still keep Samsung in the fight, certainly as an OEM option. It’s also true that consumer use has a lower bar – any halfway-decent NVMe drive is fast enough for daily driving – which means, sometimes you’re just buying the Samsung name.

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.

ATTO gives us a clear image of how a drive performs over a range of block sizes. This can relate to different file sizes, for example, you probably have many files at or below 4KiB in size for various things but larger files, archives, and media files will usually be in units of MiB. Depending on what you’re using the drive for you may want to pay attention to how a drive performs within a certain range. For the quickest comparison, we show the results on a logarithmic scale and, there, the 990 shows significant dips for reads between 64KiB and 1MiB.

What you need to know is that flash is interleaved to improve performance, which means that larger I/O sizes will show higher throughput. A single, four-plane die, with modern 16KiB pages, can interleave up to 64KiB internally. If you have one die per each of four channels, that’s 256KiB. If you parallelize that over four dies per channel – which is the ideal amount and what we have with the 2TB 990 – then you reach 1MiB. While alignment here can impact performance, for example we sometimes look at six-plane flash these days, in general you will see a gradual throughput increase as you go. You’ll see this beyond 1MiB as data can and will be cached in volatile memory, either system-side or in a small cache on the drive. If you’re looking at higher queue depths, which we do with CrystalDiskMark, performance saturates even further as the controller is able to optimize data placement and retrieval with knowledge of what’s coming.

What this usually means is that QD8 is enough to get drives close together, while there will be more disparity at QD1. QD1 is much closer to real-world, as most operations will be at low queue depth, the vast majority at our below QD4 and the majority at QD1 or QD2.

We see that the 990 matches the P310 with QD1 reads, while some drives, like the X1070, do surprisingly well. We can assume that the controller plays at least a partial role here. The X1070 is a good example because, let’s be real, it’s not a drive a lot of reviewers liked. Yet, it has pretty good performance in this instance, indicating it could be a solid secondary storage drive. Fair enough. The 990 just doesn’t really have the response we like to see for that, but it’s fast enough to remain relevant. We got the impression in our X1070 review that its controller was chosen for cost savings and that was plenty for daily use, but we don’t think Samsung cheaped out on the PiccoloQ. Rather, Samsung is looking at the bigger picture, as it also sells drives with the Piccolo controller, including its OEM offerings.

Random latency seems much more important to a lot of people. We generally find that sub-50µs is one bar and another is sub-45µs. The 990 manages the former, which puts it above last-gen drives and some earlier Gen 4 drives, and budget drives like the X1070. It’s in the same ballpark as the NV3, too. It’s sufficiently far behind more popular budget drives, though, to draw our interest. In most cases you won’t notice it, but if you’re using this as your only drive and are sensitive to that, it’s not your best option. On the other hand, we think you have to balance that against pricing and some management of expectations. Any modern SSD is going to be very fast, and with current pricing it might be worth putting more weight on reliability, for example.

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.

Samsung’s TurboWrite 2.0 caching technology utilizes a fixed, static portion of pSLC combined with a much larger dynamic portion. These two zones have unique characteristics which, when taken together, ideally keep the drive feeling fast across a variety of workloads. The static portion ensures the drive always has some cache for random writes, while the dynamic portion varies with drive usage so that you always have ample cache. While the 990 EVO had 108GB total regardless of capacity, it’s more typical for Samsung to increase both caches in absolute terms as capacity goes up. This is the case with the 990 EVO Plus, which has a 216GB cache at 2TB. But we know from our 9100 Pro review that Samsung is quite capable of going with a larger cache. The general trend for consumer SSDs has been to go that way, especially for QLC-based and DRAM-less SSDs, as it better hides weak performance states.

Therefore, it’s not too surprising that the 990’s cache is pretty large. In its fastest state, it writes at almost 6.1 GB/s for over 57 seconds, for a cache in excess of 350GB. This is larger than the 2TB 990 EVO Plus’s but smaller than the 2TB 9100 Pro’s. Our suspicion is that the 990 follows the newer, larger scheme, but we’re dealing with QLC rather than TLC flash. QLC flash to pSLC is 4 bits to 1, while TLC is 3 bits to 1, so in relative terms the 990 lines up with the 9100 Pro. That’s all fine and good. As for how fast it writes, Samsung markets the 990 as having over 50% faster write performance than the 990 EVO, which is accurate simply because we’re moving from 1,600 to 2,400 MT/s, with newer flash and firmware.

Once the cache is exhausted, the drive has to write to the native QLC flash directly or fold data over from pSLC to QLC. The latter is slower but can reduce wear in some cases – folding uses predictable, sequential writes – and reduces the likelihood of errors in transmission. Considering the technology we mentioned above and how Samsung avoids problems with power loss, it makes sense that going slower is by design. In fact, given we know the expected speed of the flash – rated at 41 MB/s per die – we can reasonably assume the firmware wants this outcome. It’s not that the flash can’t handle higher speeds, even at the risk of endurance. It’s simply that for a consumer drive of this type, the response is reasonable and measured. Going faster would require reducing the cache size potentially, which tends not to be a good trade-off for this type of drive.

One interesting thing about the V9 flash is that it can operate in a pTLC caching mode. We don’t see that here. Honestly, that’s not too surprising: Solidigm’s 5-bit PLC flash effectively was designed to run as QLC/pQLC for enterprise, so it’s possible this pTLC mode was for cases where you might need that higher level of performance or endurance. After all, this is extremely dense flash even in such a mode, which points more at enterprise use.

We’ve seen QLC flash from Kioxia also optionally have this mode – and for that matter, Solidigm’s PLC can do pTLC, too – in the past, but that mode doesn’t appear to be designed for consumer use. There may be other reasons for not using it in a consumer product, such as power optimization, as consumer workloads probably benefit more from a straight pSLC and native/QLC hybrid.

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 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.

Is the 990 power-efficient? Samsung markets the drive as being 38% more efficient than the 990 EVO – or that it cuts power consumption by 38% – which, technically, works with our numbers. It’s not a huge bar to hit as the 990 EVO was not very power-efficient. Even the X1070 is significantly more efficient! The 990, unfortunately, really doesn’t do well against other drives in its class, regardless of flash. We can’t chalk this up as being fully due to the controller because the 990 EVO Plus does well enough for itself.

This is actually expected since, for example, the Blue SN5100, which is using BiCS8 QLC, is less efficient than its BiCS8 TLC sibling, the Black SN7100. QLC and TLC flash of the same generation often have significant differences. TLC flash saw six planes first while QLC tends to be optimized for density. While it’s true that pSLC performance between the two is often comparable, behind the scenes the drive still has to deal with wear-leveling, garbage collection, and other maintenance with block granularity. QLC is slower, with larger blocks and pSLC taking more bits. So all else being equal, TLC often outshines it in power efficiency.

Our impression here, as is the case elsewhere in the review, is that this flash is basically V7 QLC with twice the density. Samsung uses impressive tricks to get it there; the flash is technically a bit faster and more efficient, and it has some neat changes that mostly apply to enterprise. This means you can have the 990 doing worse than the 990 EVO Plus with its V8 TLC. This is not perplexing. QLC flash is made for bit density, and Samsung intends to scale flash for a very long time. It also skipped V8 QLC for a reason. This doesn’t endear it to people wanting to buy this drive for laptops, although we assure you that this does use some cutting-edge technology, and we do think it should be very reliable. It’s just not going to be as efficient as you might expect.

Samsung is cognizant that its drives will end up with OEM variants in laptops and in many cases, shorter form factors. The 990 EVO wasn’t a great laptop drive due to its heat generation, but it works. The 990 is significantly better, so it, too, will work as a laptop drive. We think this drive deserves a heatsink in a desktop or PS5, and probably should have heatspreading of some sort anywhere else, if at all possible.

The question is, will it overheat? In our testing, we found that it got closer than we prefer to that point. Our maximum reported controller temperature was high relative to the initial throttling temperature, but a true composite value would be lower. Even so, the controller did get warm. On the other hand, our Iometer testing is far from real-world. We push our drives hard. This is not the sort of drive for a desktop replacement or high-end laptop in our opinion, although we think with typical workloads it’s perfectly fine. After all, the results here are better than the SK hynix Gold P31, which is a laptop staple. By all means, in a Gen 3 slot this thing will fly. If you’re hammering it at Gen 4 speeds, though, yeah, it’s not the coolest drive in town.

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.

Samsung 990 Bottom Line

The Samsung 990 is bound to be underwhelming for some, but none of our results should surprise. We know what this technology is and we’ve seen Samsung’s entries in recent years with the 990 EVO, the 990 EVO Plus, and the 9100 Pro. You could even put the 980 and 990 Pros into that mix. The move away from DRAM on the EVO Plus series, in particular, was a sign of the times. It’s not surprising to see the raw 990 – the 980 was TLC-based – go to QLC without the “QVO” addendum. The original speculation of the 990 QVO being a QLC 990 EVO, with the EVO itself being a surprisingly “slow” drive, was probably correct given the OEM evidence, and the 990 being a step up lets it command the 990 name by itself. To reiterate, this is exactly what we expected.

Skipping over the 990 QVO and V7 QLC flash is only sidestepping, and that’s likely because the market has changed so much over the last year or two. Bringing out a QLC-based 990 EVO equivalent just wouldn’t sell and might even make the brand look bad. It could certainly be done, and even still done, as an affordable SKU with better yields. But any 990 was going to be exactly what we got, instead. You need the faster flash to saturate PCIe 4.0 with a DRAM-less drive, and this was always going to be DRAM-less. Using a new or licensed controller with TLC flash would be weird, as it’d be going up against the existing 990 EVO Plus. Frankly, the 990 is a good 990 EVO replacement from retail and OEM perspectives, with one caveat: endurance. Samsung saves itself some headaches by reducing the warranty to three years, and as this flash is robust, it can just nudge up the TBW as a distraction.

We think that’s an important part of the message here. This flash seems designed for enterprise and has technological changes to back that up, with the main consumer benefits being the potential for increased reliability. But memory is still in high demand, and this has to be a budget part, so here comes the three-year warranty. Performance is not bad – it certainly beats earlier Gen 4 QLC-based drives and would beat the rumored 990 QVO as well. It’s just not really performance-focused. It’s also a much more efficient design, but that’s in comparison to Samsung’s own hardware. It’s merely mediocre there in the current landscape. Samsung seems to be building for the future with higher layer counts and bit density, so this lays the groundwork. A client drive seems almost like an afterthought. Users shouldn’t take that personally, but also shouldn’t underestimate this drive as it’s more than effective enough for its purpose.

In fact, in the era of Gen 3 drives returning and so many “box of chocolates” SSDs with random names and hardware, a reliable Samsung SSD is a nice option. Even with QLC flash. If you only need a budget drive to throw into a build or to upgrade an old PC, you get Gen 4 performance and a TLC-like experience for most things. We also feel this drive should be reliable and, although it runs hotter than we’d like, it’s not going to be molten like some other drives. It’s just a polished design by Samsung that fills a micro niche, and clearly it thought a response was needed. It’s not a lot different than our reaction has been to Samsung’s last few new drives, which have all been competent but largely never the strtong leader. That’s okay with us, as we can tell the manufacturer has a longer-term perspective; it just means a little less awe when you finish a build using a Samsung drive.

If you really want the best experience with a QLC-based drive, we still recommend the Crucial P310 – which is going away – or the Sandisk WD Blue SN5100. These offer incredible performance for QLC flash. Otherwise, there are some MP44Q-like drives out there that continue to be budget leaders. The 990 fits somewhere along there as a known-brand alternative. If you’re looking for Gen 5, DRAM, or TLC, then you’re also looking at a higher price tag. Frankly, QLC costs more than it should, in part due to enterprise demand. On the other hand, a modern QLC drive will provide an equivalent experience 99% of the time. The priorities are up to you. For us, the 990 is a fine primary drive for normal builds and OK for laptops, although we’d go cheaper for the PS5 and higher-end for an enthusiast machine.

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A stylish new product encourages the repurposing of old IDE optical drives as standalone audio players. Boutique South Korean electronic device maker das_POD has launched the CD-ROM PLAYER 01 (ships worldwide), and it has some distinct Teenage Engineering-a-like design flair. Any similarity to genuine TE products is purely accidental, we’re sure. The new self-assembly and bring-your-own optical drive enclosure costs from $190.

This das_POD product is “designed to be assembled, repaired, and owned,” says the maker. In contrast to a conventional hi-fi CD music player, the CD-ROM PLAYER 01 is supplied as a project that lets owners repurpose their old, unused, or discarded optical drives. The artsy assertion of das_POD is that “the project explores ownership, reparability, and the physical experience of music.”

As we stressed in the intro, the kit is supplied without any IDE optical drive, something required to complete the project. “Compatible IDE drives can often be found in old computers, second-hand markets, recycling centers, or forgotten boxes in storage,” points out das_POD, just in case you have never heard of eBay. “Every drive carries its own history. Every player becomes unique,” it adds, attempting to add mystique to a simple recycling/upcycling project.

We looked through the das_POD store and noticed that it sells some very reasonably priced IDE drives that can be used to facilitate a complete CD-ROM PLAYER 01 delivered in one package. Several refurb opticals are priced at just $5, for example. But you can also pick through multiple drives at $10, $15, $20… all the way up to $40. Something about the $35 DRIVE_24 from Samsung with its blue logo bar and tarnished beige faceplate (Grade: Output: A+, Sound Quality: A, Condition: C) grabbed my attention.

There are two CD-ROM PLAYER 01 colorways to choose from right now. das_POD sells a model in an anodized semi-gloss white for $220. A model in TE-a-like powder-coated orange is priced at $190.

The maker boasts that the kit supplied needs no soldering. But we also learn on the respective product pages that an AUX cable and 12V power adapter are (also) not included. Circling back to the firm’s online store, it looks like purchasing these items will add $25 to $30 to your checkout total.

A cheaper Aliexpress + DIY alternative for makers?

As some social media commenters say, besides the case, another key component of this product appears to be a CD/DVD-ROM optical drive controller, much like one available from Aliexpress for $30. That leaves the das_POD power board PCB as the sole missing essential, preventing makers with 3D printers, laser cutters, and/or CNCs from crafting their own CD-ROM PLAYER 01-type kits.

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Another day, another TeamGroup drive, right? Yet the G70 Pro surprises with some unusually good results, combining DRAM and newer flash into a powerful but affordable drive. We have some questions about the controller choice, but the drive as a whole is surprisingly good.

The devil, as they say, is in the details, as its performance quirks make it better for some use cases over others. It’s also not something you want to toss into your laptop – this is still a high-end drive with correspondingly high heat production – but could work in a pinch for pretty much anything else. In this market, it’s a welcome alternative.

TeamGroup G70 Pro Specifications

If you’re ever upset that a drive only comes in one or two capacities, then the TeamGroup G70 Pro might be for you. Not only does it come in both heatsinked and non-heatsinked versions, but it’s also available at 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and even 8TB. At the time of review, we could only find 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models available, with pricing pretty close between the two types – go for the heatsink, if you can. We’re giving the lower prices at $197.99, $326.99, and $505.99. If you’re shooting for DRAM, these prices aren’t too bad, but we’d lean towards the Seagate FireCuda 530R instead at 1TB. The G70 Pro is more competitive at 2TB and 4TB against comparable drives.

The drive is capable of reaching up to 7,400 / 6,600 MB/s for sequential reads. Random read and write IOPS are not given, but we know this controller and flash are rated for at least 700K and can reach 1,000K or more. This is comparable to other drives in this class. We wouldn’t recommend the drive at 512GB as it can’t reach peak performance. Ideally, you would go for 2TB or 4TB for the best results. The drive is backed by a five-year warranty that covers 740TB of written data per TB, which is above average but not exceptional.

TeamGroup G70 Pro Software and Accessories

TeamGroup’s primary download for the G70 Pro is its SSD S.M.A.R.T. Tool. This all-in-one SSD toolbox displays drive and system information and allows for performance testing. While you can sometimes catch drive errors early with SMART, it’s best not to rely on it. For drive and data backup we continue to recommend MultiDrive for Windows and Clonezilla or Rescuezilla for everything else.

TeamGroup G70 Pro: A Closer Look

The 2TB TeamGroup G70 Pro is a double-sided drive and, judging by the specifications, always double-sided. We don’t have smaller SKUs to verify that, and we recommend the larger SKUs as the better value anyway. However, we’ve heard of single-sided G70 Pros at 1TB in the wild, so your mileage may vary.

Our drive uses a graphene label – which is useful for spreading heat from the controller, in particular – but there is also a version with a heatsink. We would recommend going with a heatsink, if possible. The rear of the drive states a power rating of ~8.25W, which is within expectations. In our testing, we would expect it to pull less and, in fact, that is what our numbers show.

The drive is adorned with an SSD controller, two DRAM packages, and four NAND flash packages. The controller is the InnoGrit IG5236, an eight-channel controller with DRAM that competes directly with the Silicon Motion SM2264 and Phison E18. These are at the top of the PCIe 4.0 product stack. The DRAM in question is SK hynix H5AN8G6NDJR-VKC, which, as the 8G indicates, is in an 8Gb or 1GB configuration. Two packages mean 2GB, which gives the normal 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND ratio for optimal performance. The flash packages are 512GB each of YMTC 232-Layer TLC (X3-9070) with four 1Tb dies each. With a total of sixteen dies, or two per channel, performance is good at this capacity.

Let’s address the elephant in the room: the IG5236 controller. This controller was one of our favorites when it first came out, as it competed with the E18 – the first true non-proprietary high-end PCIe 4.0 controller – at a lower price point. Eventually, it saw some flash it didn’t like from YMTC, which caused some serious issues. Over time and with more feedback, the controller eventually gained a more general reputation for unreliability. Reliability reports were often unpredictable, which didn’t help matters. While, as a result, we do prefer the E18, our review of this G70 Pro sample has given indications that TeamGroup took some efforts to improve reliability. We’ll point these out as we go forward.

The bigger issue for the drive is probably that TeamGroup will likely not have one specific set of hardware for this drive, which means that, while we think you’re probably okay with the mix we got, we can’t guarantee this is the NAND and SSD controller configuration that you’ll receive.

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Comparison Products

If you’re looking at the G70 Pro, you’re probably also looking at TeamGroup’s A440 series – we have the A440 Pro for comparison – as well as the Inland Gaming Performance Plus or Performance Plus and the WD Black SN850X. These are all high-end Gen 4 drives with DRAM. If you’re willing to compromise on DRAM to save some money but still want high-end performance, there are some good options out there. These include the Addlink A93, the Acer Predator GM7, and the Biwin Black Opal NV7400. We’ve also thrown two newer drives into the mix, which are compelling: the Crucial P310, which uses QLC flash, and the WD Black SN7100, the power efficiency champion.

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.

The G70 Pro falls right in the middle of the pack, which is actually right where it should be. 43µs for latency in 3DMark is quite good, ensuring a good experience with fast game loading times. Any of these drives would be great for games – and probably overkill – but we look for 45µs or less for the best level of responsiveness. The G70 Pro hits this target.

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 G70 Pro does better in PCMark 10, coming in near the top with respectably high bandwidth and low latency. This is very good performance for applications, and the drive would be great as your primary drive even in a workstation. It makes use of the DRAM and eight flash channels to deliver relatively high performance, beating perennial favorites like the Black SN850X. This is likely due to the fact that it uses 232-Layer flash, which is newer than anything the slower drives have.

The Black SN7100 and P310 are DRAM-less with four channels, but they use newer flash of an equivalent generation with newer controllers than the G70 Pro. This goes to show that you don’t need a full-power controller to dominate here, but we caution that this does not reflect edge case performance with a fuller drive or in long-term use.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. Based on our extensive testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data, both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

The G70 Pro performs admirably in the PS5. Would we recommend it? Yes, but with caveats. It’s not a bad choice at 2TB and 4TB, but we would recommend getting the version with a heatsink, if possible. The drive might run toasty without it. We also think you can get DRAM-less drives that will perform nearly the same at a lower cost, that won’t need a heatsink, so factor that into any purchase decision.

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.

Taking a quick look at our DiskBench results, the G70 Pro exhibits no issues. Its copy performance is, in fact, quite good, coming close to the top. To be fair, some of the drives near it are DRAM-less, so they should be less expensive and more power-efficient in practice. That said, if you’re looking for the total package, then the G70 Pro will deliver. We would recommend checking our Write Saturation section to see how these drives measure up with longer transfers.

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.

Looking at ATTO first, we see a disappointing dip most prominently at 512KiB reads with the G70 Pro. The question is: controller or flash? Possibly a bit of both, as we’ve seen weak performance in ATTO on this controller before, but not all drives have had issues. If we’re comparing the XS70, which uses 512Gb dies with four-plane flash, to the G70 Pro, which has 1Gb dies using six planes, then we consider that the superpage size – this would be the size of all pages open across all dies/planes with at least one per flash channel – is quite different.

Parallelization is necessary to reach the best performance with larger files, and the G70 Pro’s flash crosses a threshold between 512KiB and 1MiB, which might explain this dip. In fact, the flash on the 2TB model would prefer I/O larger than 1MiB. The older XS70, as reviewed, would be happier with less. This is an inevitable trade-off as newer flash technology targets larger dies to reduce price and more planes for higher bandwidth to match new interface speeds.

This difference is reflected to some extent in CDM, where QD1 sequential read for the G70 Pro performance is pretty meh. Give it QD8, though, and it’s on top. Unfortunately, low QD is much more common, especially for large file transfers. Of course, you need another drive to match the speed anyway, and if you’re doing heavier workloads, you might actually push more than QD1 where this drive proves to be quite fast. The bottom line is that some of these drives with less-dense flash – like the Black SN850X – or fewer channels – that would be the P310, Black SN7100, A93, Black Opal NV7400, and GM7 – can do better with QD1 reads. On the other hand, the G70 Pro’s newer flash makes it more responsive with QD1 writes, although this is less impressive for everyday workloads.

The good news is that the 4KB latencies are good, and the 4KB random read latency at QD1 is exceptional. This is a ridiculously responsive drive. It’s a bit strange to have a drive that superficially should push bandwidth turn around and give such excellent latency. The discrepancy, given our above explanation about parallelization, is due in part to the fact that a single 4KB operation is only going to hit one die and plane of flash. This could work in the drive’s favor if you are taking advantage of the right workloads. For random reads, everyday workloads, including games and apps, will be very responsive. For larger transfers, push this drive harder if you’re reading from it to better take advantage of its strengths, or alternatively, use it for random writes as you could do with caching.

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.

The G70 Pro has a small cache, coming in around 50GB with a pSLC write speed of 6.7 GB/s that writes for about 7.5s effectively. We’ve seen caches of this size before, usually chosen to improve “quality of service,” which is a fancy way of saying the manufacturer wants to avoid a performance cliff. 50GB is still relatively large for caching random writes, and random writes are what you want to cache the most, and the absolute size will vary a lot less with drive fill, as it’s not taking up a lot of native flash. This means more consistent write performance. A drive might also use a small cache to hide weak flash – weak as in lower endurance – as the highest-endurance portion of the flash can be used for the cache, if you’re doing big writes like we are here, doing writes straight to the native flash can actually induce less wear in some cases. However, we think TeamGroup is just aiming for consistent performance, with the secondary effect being that they can swap flash if needed.

The drive then writes to native flash at almost 2.8 GB/s for 16 seconds. This flash can write faster than this and, given that the drive is 2TB, it could absolutely write in this state – or the pSLC state, for that matter – for a significantly longer time. The 4TB model should be as fast or faster. Still, this is pretty speedy and matches the consistent write experience we would anticipate from the small cache. On the other hand, it does make us wonder why TeamGroup is being so conservative with it. This controller has had some issues in the past, and this might be a way to mitigate those. If so, we’re on board, as this type of performance profile matches the drive’s overall trend quite well.

This is especially true with folding performance at over 1.35 GB/s – quite fast for that state – and given how small the cache is and how short the drive writes even in native mode, the real steady state is closer to our native flash speed at 2.75 GB/s. This is a very good result and supports our earlier assertion that this drive would be great for certain workloads like caching. TeamGroup likely knows this, and if the drive is more reliable for it, all the better. We think that’s worth knowing if you’re a buyer because the IG5236 controller does carry a somewhat negative reputation under normal circumstances.

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 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.

All this performance comes at a cost. The G70 Pro is not very efficient, although it’s better than the E18-based drive and comes awfully close to the Black SN850X. For a DRAM-equipped, eight-channel PCIe 4.0 drive, it does okay. If you are looking for a power-efficient drive, this isn’t it, although it could be worse.

The drive reports multiple temperatures, but the one we’re looking at is the highest. It hit a maximum of 71°C in our testing, which is surprisingly good, given that this controller starts to throttle at 90°C. That’s almost at our ideal 20°C of headroom. However, the drive is still putting out a lot of heat, and this is under good conditions with a graphene heatspreader. Running this drive naked in a laptop is inadvisable. We continue to recommend getting the G70 Pro with a heatsink or adding a heatsink to the graphene model – you can even put a heatsink over the graphene label, if necessary – to make for a cooler-running drive.

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.

TeamGroup G70 Pro Bottom Line

The TeamGroup G70 Pro promises a little bit of everything in a challenging SSD market. DRAM? Check. All the best drives have DRAM, or so people have been led to believe, and that simple inclusion puts the G70 Pro up a notch. Newer flash? Also, check for our sample, 232-Layer rather than 176-Layer, and TLC too. In practice, the difference is small, but if you can get newer flash, you should, and TLC is always preferable to QLC. Cooling? It comes with a graphene heatspreader by default, but has a heatsink SKU for those who want one less thing to worry about. With this combo, the drive delivers excellent random read latency, good potential throughput, and with a heatsink, it shouldn't overheat. Plus, it’s available in a wide range of capacities.

There are some caveats here, however. The drive is not power-efficient, so it is bound to run hot even if it doesn’t throttle. It has DRAM and newer flash, but the controller is the less desirable InnoGrit IG5236, one that’s known to be less reliable. The flash is also YMTC, which indicates to us that you might not always get the same hardware on this model. Performance is good, yes, but it’s not completely consistent across all of our tests. While we like that we can get this from 512GB to 8TB, in reality, you’re only going to find the middle SKUs. The drive is best at 2TB or 4TB, and its pricing at 1TB is average at best. We can live with this as 2TB and 4TB are good places to be, no matter what you use this drive for: primary for your operating system, secondary for games or storage, or in your PS5.

Speaking of what you use it for, the drive’s performance profile means it could make a good caching or NAS drive. We would definitely recommend a heatsink in that role. It’s not perfect for such a workload, but it’s probably going to be better than most of the DRAM-less options that are out there, and it should cost you less than the Black SN850X or 990 Pro. While reliability concerns linger with this controller, we feel like TeamGroup has optimized the firmware and pSLC cache towards a more consistent experience over hitting record numbers. This, in our mind, is a good thing and helps make this drive a potential diamond in the rough.

MORE: Best SSDs

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A Reddit user shared the 16TB SSD they bought on eBay for less than $30 (EUR 25), which only contained a board and a microSD card hot-glued with some weights to make it feel like a legitimate drive. u/Hartkralle shared their find, saying that they buy from these suspicious listings when they come across them. Since eBay has a robust consumer protection policy, they get their money back while the seller loses their account.

16 TB SSD for only 25€? What could go wrong? from r/pcmasterrace

"I buy one, check if it's legit or not, and if not, [I] report the seller to eBay. I get my money back, and they (the seller) lose [their] account,” u/HarkKralle said in a comment. “If I couldn't ensure that the money would flow back, I wouldn't do it.”

Another Redditor said that they appreciate what the OP was doing, but they were “99.99% positive” that the scammer would have another account in an hour. The OP replied, saying, “Possible, but even that it's an hour they cannot use to scam people and proof/information for more people that scams like this exist.”

Scams like these have been around for decades now. One commenter even added that back in the ‘90s, they used high-quality 60-minute VHS tapes for their work, but one time received cheap, low-quality tapes that could only hold five minutes of footage instead. The sample that u/Hartkralle showed is also relatively low effort. Because of the ongoing memory and chip shortage, we’ve seen exceptionally good clones of Samsung 990 Pro SSDs, one of the best SSDs you can buy today. They have become so sophisticated that the most reliable way of spotting if they’re fake is to check them on CrystalDiskInfo.

One of the downsides of these fake drives is that you won’t get the read and write speeds that you’d expect from a modern SSD. But the bigger issue here is that using them could lead to complete data loss. For example, the fake drive that u/Hartkralle bought reports a capacity of 16TB, but the microSD card inside it is only 60GB. So, if an unsuspecting user transfers more than 60GB of data, they’d end up corrupting everything stored in the drive.

A 2TB Amazon Basics Portable SSD already costs almost $360, while an 8TB SSD from reputable brands like SanDisk, Crucial, or Lexar already hit $850. So, someone who doesn’t follow developments in the tech industry and stumbles across this cheap drive might think they’re getting a steal, when, in reality, they’re the ones being stolen from. Thankfully, eBay’s consumer protection allows people who were scammed, intentionally or otherwise, to get their money back — that is, if they know they were scammed in the first place.

Kioxia and Sandisk last week said they had started sampling of their latest 3D NAND memory with 332 active layers that features a combination of the industry's leading areal density and performance. The new 10th Generation BiCS 3D TLC NAND is set to address density and performance-sensitive data center applications, as well as promises to surpass Samsung’s latest V10-class 3D NAND in terms of storage density.

Unlike the previous generations, 10th Generation BiCS (BiCS10) is explicitly aimed at data center-grade storage, where bit density and performance are more important than cost. Indeed, the new type of memory features a 332-layer active layer architecture, greater than 29 Gb/mm² density, and a 4,800 MT/s data transfer rate to enable extreme performance for data center solid-state drives featuring PCIe 5.0 and 6.0 interfaces. Kioxia and Sandisk plan to offer BiCS9 NAND specifically for client applications.

When we normally describe 3D NAND memory, we usually mention all possible applications, which include high-end consumer SSDs (after all, we are Tom's Hardware, we are hardware enthusiasts!) and data center drives. We did not mention consumer applications for BiCS10 for a very specific reason: Kioxia does not position this generation for client devices and only targets data center-grade drives. Whether or not to expect BiCS10 on a high-performance SSD near you probably depends on supply and demand, given the current market circumstances.

While the BiCS10 332-layer 3D NAND boosts bit density by 59% all the way to over 29 Gb/mm², it also promises to deliver meaningful performance and efficiency gains specifically for enterprise applications. Kioxia claims read latency drops by around 4 microseconds (about 10%), while read energy consumption is reduced by 25%, from roughly 100 mJ/GB to approximately 75 mJ/GB.

According to Kioxia, these improvements stem from a redesigned read scheme that changes how unselected word lines behave during consecutive read operations. In a 332-layer NAND stack, a significant portion of read latency and power consumption is associated with repeatedly charging long word lines from ground (VSS) to the read voltage (VREAD).

Normally, NAND memory discharges its wordlines to ground (VSS) after every read, which is a general-purpose approach that works regardless of what the next operation is. However, there is no need to discharge at all times. Therefore, during continuous read operations, the word lines are not fully discharged in the case of BiCS10. Instead, they are lowered to an intermediate voltage and then raised back to VREAD for the next read, which makes a lot of sense for read-heavy applications (most cloud applications are).

After the initial read, the circuitry reduces the word-line voltage only to an intermediate level instead of completely discharging it to VSS. Before the next access, the voltage is restored to VREAD from that intermediate level rather than from ground. Since the voltage excursion is considerably smaller, the word lines recharge more quickly and require less current, which improves both read latency and energy efficiency. The approach is particularly beneficial for very tall 3D NAND stacks, where long word lines amplify charging delays and power losses during sustained sequential read workloads.

It is interesting to note that Kioxia and Sandisk plan to manufacture their BiCS9 and BiCS10 3D NAND products at different production sites. The newest Fab 2 facility in Kitakami, Iwate Prefecture, will handle production of the flagship 332-layer BiCS10 memory, while the long-established Yokkaichi complex in Mie Prefecture will continue manufacturing the 218-layer BiCS9 generation.

This manufacturing split makes a lot of sense. Fab 2 is equipped with Kioxia’s most advanced production tools, so it is better suited to manufacture the highest-density NAND from Kioxia and Sandisk. Meanwhile, the mature Yokkaichi fabs are well-suited for client-oriented BiCS9 production. The manufacturing facility has largely been depreciated, which enables the company to manufacture mainstream NAND at lower cost and reserve its newest capacity in Kitakami for leading-edge products.

While PC enthusiasts and DIYers gnash their teeth over the RAMpocalypse, the world’s makers and DIYers are busying themselves with alternative, DIY, and left-field solutions to the terrible component crunch. The latest to throw their hat in the DIY memory ring is polymatt with a video walkthrough showing how they made a USB drive with 64 bits of storage. Yes, bits, not even bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, and certainly not terabytes. Still, the video provides another look at the charms of ancient (in computing terms) Magnetic Core Memory.

Polymatt sums up their finished USB memory device as a gizmo with “64 iron rings, hand threaded and immersed in silicon oil.” Each ring can store a single bit, providing 64 bits (8 bytes) of total storage capacity. Though this way of providing memory to computer systems seems incredibly archaic, it was good enough for the Apollo spacecraft guidance computers.

Polymatt got a key ingredient for this retro-modern memory stick project by salvaging an old Russian computer for its tiny magnetic rings. Then we see the TechTuber skillfully make each component of the finished magnetic core memory device by hand, by soldering iron, by CNC machine, and using a Bambu Lab A2L 3D printer.

While Polymatt humbly describes the device they made as the “world’s worst USB drive,” that’s only probably true if judged by its capacity-to-weight ratio. In aesthetic terms, it looks great on the desk. Moreover, what it might lack in memory density it makes up for (a bit) by offering persistent (unpowered) storage, and it can even shrug off radiation bursts that would fry most modern memory devices.

Check out the 20-minute video if you want to see every step in the maker process. In comparison to the far larger 128-byte magnetic core memory USB drive made by a Japanese tech enthusiast earlier in the year, Polymatt’s model is rather better finished. As the TechTuber admits, the silicone oil probably wasn’t necessary, but they basically liked the aesthetic. Fair enough. They were also pondering over installing an LED for each bit, but shelved that idea.

The last section of Polymatt’s video is devoted to testing the DIY memory device. Unlike the USB storage you may be familiar with, this drive doesn’t store your discrete computer data files. Rather, it lets you edit a single persistent file dubbed core.txt, stored on the magnetic core memory array. Polymatt also verified the non-powered persistence of this DIY memory device. Unplugging and plugging the power to this USB-connected device proved that it is indeed a non-volatile memory device.

In related homebrew memory news, we are still waiting for Dr. Semiconductor to follow up on his making RAM in a garden shed cleanroom video with the promised ‘PC scale’ sequel.

As the memory and storage chip crisis continues to squeeze the market, some PC manufacturers began looking at alternative sources earlier this year just to meet consumer demand. Notebookcheck discovered in its review of the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL that it came with a 512GB YMTC M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. What’s more interesting is that the laptop is readily available in the U.S., and you can order it on Amazon for $1,124.25 at the time of writing.

This is the first recorded instance that a laptop from a major OEM is being sold in the United States with a YMTC SSD, which is particularly curious given that the company was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Entity List in 2022. While this prevented the company from acquiring goods and services that were made with or contained American technologies, it does not prevent Lenovo, whose headquarters are in China, from importing such drives into the U.S.

Major PC manufacturers have traditionally relied on established storage chip makers such as Samsung, SK hynix, Kioxia, Micron, and SanDisk, but the ongoing AI buildout has driven prices through the roof. Even Apple, which previously held significant influence over suppliers, is now seeking a blessing from the U.S. government to buy memory chips from the Chinese firm CXMT. Although it’s not on the Entity List, it’s still designated as a Chinese military company, meaning that doing business with it would carry some risk for an American company.

Notebookcheck says that the YMTC drive’s performance “is below average for an SSD in an office laptop,” meaning it could not compete against the best SSDs you can buy today. Most buyers likely won't care about this, especially since the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL is marketed as an office laptop for everyday use. This means that its target market will likely be unfamiliar with specifications like read/write speeds and will probably be satisfied as long as it’s faster than a hard drive.

Lenovo’s deployment of YMTC drives is particularly important because it’s one of the largest laptop brands in the U.S. by volume. In fact, even as PC shipments fell by 7% in the first quarter of 2026, Lenovo’s market share actually grew by 1.2%, making it the third largest desktop and notebook brand after Dell and HP. Since the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL is a relatively affordable laptop designed for office use, it would likely sell many units through enterprise purchases and help increase the adoption of Chinese storage solutions in the U.S.

Since YMTC is also listed as a Chinese military company, institutions looking to buy this particular model may face procurement challenges, especially if they operate in sensitive industries or are government agencies. However, it seems that the memory chip crisis has grown to the point where it’s willing to offer a model it won’t be able to sell in some instances. Nevertheless, this helps ensure that buyers without restrictions have a more affordable option.

GitHub has announced that it will be giving developers a way to obtain their public repo on a CD-ROM. Thanks to this initiative, a dev will be able to obtain a physical copy of their code and “Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.” This would be a very unusual offer from GitHub without the context of Sony’s official announcement, stating that it will cease the production and distribution of PlayStation games via physical media in 2028.

Above you can see that GitHub is lending its voice to those who reckon Sony’s move is wrong or, at best, premature. The coding and collaboration platform, owned by Microsoft, states that “In light of recent developments in physical media, GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM.” Moreover, it appeals to the human side of computing, adding the emotive line “Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.”

It isn’t April 1^st, so thankfully this is no joke. However, if you check out the above-linked GitHub Your Code, On a CD offer page, it quickly becomes clear this is a very limited in time/scope stunt.

“Order a burned CD of your own public GitHub repo. Yes, a real physical disc you can hold in your hands, no download required,” begins the spiel. But this is a very limited run of 1,000 discs, with applications required between July 2 and July 6 (inclusive). Limit one per person, with availability varying between country/region.

“Your code is physically yours, forever. Until you lose it, let's be real,” says GitHub. At best, these CDs will be framed and put on a wall, some becoming collector’s items or eBay money spinners (discs like 0001 or 0888 would be good ones, if they are numbered). Also, many will be lost or eventually/accidentally discarded, as GitHub seems to know. So this 'protest' is arguably 1,000 doses of expensively shipped e-waste.

Circling back to the context of this GitHub story, it is clear it is a small protest at Sony essentially ringing the death knell for physical media in modern gaming. Consoles were already rolling inexorably down this road with the cheaper digital edition hardware releases, and other games industry players are pushing in the same direction. Digital-only isn’t likely going to end up well for gamers, archivists, second-hand stores, and others – with used game media disappearing from the scene, to name but one impending issue.

SSD prices remain absolutely exorbitant, but this discount on Samsung's 9100 Pro 1TB SSD was a rare bright spot during Prime Day. It's not the cheapest we've ever seen this drive, but right now you can still get it for $206 at Amazon, 39% off and the lowest price we've seen in months. Make the most of this deal while you can.

• Check out this deal at Amazon

Unlike the Gen 4 990 Pro, the Samsung 9100 Pro SSD boasts sequential read speeds of up to 14,700MB/s thanks to PCIe 5.0. As such, it's one of the fastest drives on the market, perfect for high-performance gaming or heavy professional workloads. By contrast, the 990 Pro is actually more expensive, currently $219 at Amazon, despite the fact that it offers about half the read and write speeds of this drive. While SSD prices are massively inflated, this drive's previous lowest-ever price was $126, so percentage-wise it's a big step up, but in real terms, it's only $80 more expensive than you'd have paid last year pre-AI price crunch. A tough pill to swallow, but if you want a good Gen 5 SSD for a new PC build or your PS5, this is one of the better options.

During Prime Day, we also saw a significant discount on the 2TB version, which was priced at $349. It's now back up to $399, which is still slightly better value per GB but a much bigger outlay overall. At 41% off, this is down from the highest price of $505 in April, but nowhere near the $169 you'd have got it for last year.

This drive is no slouch, and while it's not the out-and-out fastest drive on the market, it leaves most SSDs in the dust, as you can see from our testing data below:

Notably, in PCMark 10 Storage tests, the 9100 scored higher than any other drive we've tested. As mentioned, at the very least this deal is a no-brainer pick over the 990 Pro, which isn't as fast or as cheap (provided your motherboard supports PCIe 5.0, of course).

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Solidigm is arguably one of the most mysterious storage companies in the industry today. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of SK hynix, yet unlike its parent company, which produces charge-trap flash memory, it uses floating-gate 3D NAND memory that it develops and manufactures internally at a dedicated fab in Dalian, China.

Solidigm originates from Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), the company's NAND and SSD business unit, which used to have a unique technology strategy that differed from that of other flash and drive producers. To that end, it is not surprising that Solidigm also has a unique positioning as it only offers data center drives, most of which are based on floating-gate memory and proprietary in-house designed controllers. Furthermore, Solidigm is a fully vertically integrated company.

At Computex 2026, we sat down with Avi Shetty, who is vice president of AI ecosystem, Solutions & Market Enablement at Solidigm. Before his current position at Solidigm, he spent 14.5 years at Intel's storage division, so he has deep knowledge both about technology and the market. During our conversation, we discussed how Solidigm keeps evolving, including floating-gate NAND memory, advanced packaging technologies, next-generation SSDs, liquid-cooled SSDs, and more.

Anton Shilov: Could you introduce yourself to our readers and describe what do you do at Solidigm?

Avi Shetty: My name is Avi Shetty. I work at Solidigm, where I help lead AI solutions and ecosystem initiatives. My team works with global platform providers, software ISVs, and ODMs to ensure Solidigm solutions are validated, benchmarked, and included in reference designs at both the device and cluster levels, enabling customers to fully utilize our products.

A part of SK hynix that acts independently

Anton Shilov: You were previously a part of Intel. How is the integration going? Are you now fully integrated part of SK hynix, or do you operate independently?

Avi Shetty: Let me provide some background. While Solidigm was established in December 2021, our history goes back decades. Many of us came from Intel's Non-Volatile Memory Solutions Group (NSG), which developed Intel’s NAND SSDs for both client and data center markets.

In 2021, SK hynix acquired Intel’s NAND and SSD business and established Solidigm. Since December 2021, we have operated as a wholly owned U.S. subsidiary of SK hynix, headquartered in Rancho Cordova, California.

Anton Shilov: So, you are part of SK hynix, but still maintain a degree of independence?

Avi Shetty: Absolutely. We operate as an independent subsidiary of SK hynix. Our strategy is focused entirely on enterprise SSDs. Every bit of [floating gate] NAND [at our fab in Dalian, China] we produce goes into enterprise storage solutions.

This is one of the ways we differentiate ourselves from competitors such as Samsung and Micron, which also serve mobile and client markets. We made a deliberate decision to focus exclusively on enterprise storage and AI.

We are also fully vertically integrated. We manufacture our own NAND, develop our own controllers, write our own firmware, and design our own SSDs. While we work with manufacturing partners to build products, we control the entire technology stack.

I also believe we are the only company with access to two different NAND architectures. Through SK hynix we have access to charge trap flash (CTF) technology, and we continue to develop floating gate NAND technology for our high-density QLC SSD products.

Anton Shilov: What is Solidigm's current share of the enterprise SSD market?

Avi Shetty: Approximately 24%. That is enterprise SSDs only. We do not participate in any other NAND markets. As of the first quarter of 2025, plus or minus a few percentage points, our measured enterprise SSD market share is approximately 24%. We evaluate market-share data quarterly and semiannually, and that is the latest figure we’ve publicly discussed.

Anton Shilov: How much of your business today is concentrated in high-capacity SSDs versus higher-performance products?

Avi Shetty: High-density SSDs now represent a significant portion of our business. Because Solidigm is privately held, we do not publicly disclose that breakdown. We report our financial metrics through our parent company, SK hynix.

What I can tell you is that both our 61TB-class and 122TB-class products became customer favorites almost immediately after launch. Demand for high-density storage has been extremely strong.

Anton Shilov: I assume you also work directly with hyperscalers?

Avi Shetty: We work with a broad range of customers globally. That includes U.S. cloud service providers, Chinese cloud service providers, OEMs around the world, NeoCloud providers, software ISVs, and channel partners. We maintain customer support, engineering, and sales organizations globally. Our business spans the Americas, EMEA, China, and the rest of Asia-Pacific.

Anton Shilov: Which customer segment represents the largest opportunity for growth right now? Traditional cloud providers or something else?

Avi Shetty: We intentionally maintain a diversified customer base.

What is interesting is how quickly new segments emerge. For example, the NeoCloud market has existed for some time, but AI-focused infrastructure providers such as CoreWeave, Lambda, Crusoe, and Nebius have become much more important over the last two years.

Before the AI boom, these companies represented only a small portion of demand. Today, they are becoming a meaningful part of the market.

As AI infrastructure continues to expand, Solidigm is adapting both its customer strategy and product portfolio to support these emerging deployments while continuing to serve our traditional customers.

Floating gate NAND in 2026

CTF NAND used by major memory makers has approached 276 - 286 active layers, whereas Solidigm's floating gate flash is still at 192 layers, meaning that the company is somewhat behind some of its rivals in terms of active layers as of mid-2026. It is set to catch up with its next generation that will have over 200 layers, but only in the second half of this year. However, floating gate NAND memory still has a number of advantages over CTF, particularly for applications that Solidigm targets.

Floating gate uses a conductive polysilicon island to store charge, which provides excellent cell isolation — charge stays well-contained and is less likely to spread to or interfere with neighboring cells — and this is particularly important for 3D QLC NAND with very high layer counts. In addition, Solidigm claims that floating gate gives a strong voltage threshold window and better cell isolation, which enables the company to keep scaling QLC more while maintaining good reliability.

Anton Shilov: Are you still producing floating gate NAND, and do you intend to continue?

Avi Shetty: Absolutely. We introduced our first QLC foating gate NAND product in 2018, and today we are on our fourth generation of QLC NAND.

Our flagship high-capacity product currently ships with 192-layer floating gate NAND technology and powers our 122TB SSD.

Anton Shilov: Haven't you also announced a larger drive?

Avi Shetty: We have announced a higher-capacity product and expect it to become available later this year.

Anton Shilov: The 256TB-class drive?

Avi Shetty: Correct. Approximately 245TB usable capacity.

Anton Shilov: So you are going to have a roughly 245TB SSD available this year?

Avi Shetty: Correct.

Anton Shilov: What advantages does Floating-Gate NAND provide?

Avi Shetty: Floating gate NAND gives us scalability. We have consistently been first in the industry to push storage density in standard form factors. We were the first to introduce a 30TB SSD, then a 60TB SSD, and later a 122TB SSD.

We have been shipping the 122TB drive for nearly five quarters. We launched it in the fourth quarter of 2024, and it has since become our flagship product. It is probably our most popular product of 2025.

The reason customers like the 122TB drive is efficiency. When you look at AI data centers, customers want low power consumption, scalability, and performance. While this particular product is a PCIe Gen4 solution, our roadmap continues to increase both density and bandwidth. You will see future products based on PCIe Gen5 and PCIe Gen6.

The real attraction of the 122TB SSD is scale. In a 1U server, you can install 24 of these drives and get nearly 3PB of storage in a single rack unit.

If you look at the AI data pipeline — from training to archiving — the first and last stages require massive datasets. That is where these high-capacity SSDs are being deployed today.

Now we are also seeing growing demand from inference deployments. Inference can run in core data centers or in edge and back-office environments. Those deployments require storage that can efficiently feed GPUs and support workloads such as context storage and KV cache management. High-density SSDs help provide the capacity required for those applications.

Next-generation SSDs: PCIe Gen6 drives with liquid cooling

Anton Shilov: You mentioned PCIe Gen5 and Gen6 [next-generation drives]. I assume you are referring both to next PCIe generations and future NAND generations?

Avi Shetty: Both.

We maintain separate technology and product roadmaps. Earlier, I mentioned that our current QLC NAND is our 4^th Generation technology based on 192 layers. We will continue investing in future NAND generations as well.

On the product side, we are talking about PCIe generations. We currently ship both PCIe Gen4 and PCIe Gen5 SSDs. All of our TLC products are PCIe Gen5 today, while our QLC lineup currently remains PCIe Gen4.

Future QLC products will move to PCIe Gen5, and eventually, we will introduce PCIe Gen6 SSDs as platform vendors such as AMD, Intel, and Nvidia adopt PCIe Gen6 in their systems.

Anton Shilov: You mentioned PCIe Gen6 SSDs. You have not shipped one yet, correct?

Avi Shetty: Correct. PCIe Gen6 products are part of our future roadmap.

Anton Shilov: How close are they?

Avi Shetty: We are not making product announcements at Computex, but you will hear more from us soon.

Anton Shilov: At the moment there is really only one platform that can take advantage of them anyway. Well, two, if you consider Nvidia Vera.

Avi Shetty: That is part of the equation. When we evaluate our roadmap, we consider demand, platform readiness, and overall value to customers.

For example, we have what we call a refresh philosophy. We may introduce a PCIe Gen4 refresh or a PCIe Gen5 refresh that lowers cost or improves efficiency rather than immediately moving to a new PCIe generation.

The question is whether customers gain more value from Gen6 today or from a more mature, lower-cost Gen5 product. Those are the kinds of decisions our planning teams evaluate.

What I can say is that Solidigm maintains a full roadmap covering PCIe Gen4, Gen5, and future Gen6 SSDs across all major form factors, including U.2, E1.S, E3.S, and other EDSFF variants. Our portfolio spans capacities from 2TB all the way to 122TB.

Anton Shilov: Launching an all-new product early still gives you time to validate products with platform vendors.

Avi Shetty: Absolutely. We already work closely with platform providers to validate prototypes long before products are launched. Our engineering teams participate in interoperability events and PCI-SIG workshops to ensure products are ready when platforms become available.

Anton Shilov: That is actually interesting because PCIe Gen6 interoperability workshops have been delayed multiple times. Back in 2024, people expected the ecosystem to move much faster and interoperability workshops to start in 2024, with the list of compatible products emerging in 2025.

Avi Shetty: That is true. A lot depends on platform readiness and ecosystem scaling. PCIe Gen6 by itself is not enough. This is my personal opinion, but to fully benefit from Gen6 storage performance, the industry must also address cooling. That is one reason we invested heavily in liquid-cooled storage.

Last year, we introduced what we believe was the world's first liquid-cooled storage solution for Nvidia environments. It used E1.S PCIe Gen5 SSDs with direct liquid cooling. Historically, liquid cooling was focused on CPUs and GPUs. We extended it to storage by allowing coolant to flow through a cold plate attached to the SSD. The cold plate removes heat directly from the drive. To fully exploit PCIe Gen6 performance, the ecosystem must develop those kinds of technologies as well.

Anton Shilov: So you believe PCIe Gen6 SSDs will require liquid cooling?

Avi Shetty: At least in high-performance AI environments, particularly Nvidia-based deployments, we believe liquid cooling will be necessary.

Next-generation SSDs: PLC NAND

Anton Shilov: Will future NAND generations include both TLC and QLC? And what about PLC?

Avi Shetty: Never say never. We demonstrated PLC technology using floating gate NAND at the Flash Memory Summit several years ago. However, this business requires factory optimization and maintaining a manageable number of SKUs to maximize utilization and profitability.

That said, there absolutely will be opportunities for PLC. We have not announced any specific products or timelines, but there is active PLC development underway inside Solidigm.

Anton Shilov: That is interesting. However, PLC by itself only increases capacity by about 20% compared to QLC and at the same time requires significantly more sophisticated controllers and error correction.

Avi Shetty: That is true. However, those same concerns existed during every previous transition: from SLC to MLC, MLC to TLC, and TLC to QLC.

We were the first company to commercialize QLC NAND. Initially, many competitors questioned its value. Today, the industry increasingly recognizes the total-cost-of-ownership advantages that QLC provides, and multiple vendors now offer QLC products. I think the same process will occur with PLC.

It is also important to consider the broader market. Roughly 80% of storage capacity worldwide is still deployed on hard drives. PLC does not necessarily need to replace QLC on a one-to-one basis. Instead, it can create new opportunities where the advantages of solid-state storage — lower power consumption, higher density, smaller physical footprint, and lower total cost of ownership — become compelling.

You will likely see future solution development involving software partners that help address some of the limitations you are describing.

Anton Shilov: Do you expect retention characteristics to become a major challenge with PLC NAND?

Avi Shetty: Of course. PLC is a new technology, and retention characteristics will differ from what we see with QLC today.

The same is true across all NAND types. SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC, and eventually PLC all have different retention characteristics based on the underlying technology. The existence of those challenges does not mean we stop exploring future solutions. We will continue investing in that area.

Advanced packaging for NAND

Anton Shilov: As I mentioned, PLC only increases capacity by about 20%. Advanced packaging may ultimately have a much larger impact on SSD capacity. Could you discuss where packaging technology stands today and where it is headed?

Avi Shetty: Absolutely. Let me use our current products as an example. The 122TB SSD represents a significant packaging achievement. It is a U.2 drive with 48 NAND packages. Each package contains a 22-die stack. Each die is a 1.33Tb QLC device. Those 22-die stacks are what enable us to reach 122TB in a standard form factor.

Packaging technology remains one of our core investments. We continue developing technologies that allow us to place more dies into each package and deliver higher capacities to customers.

Anton Shilov: What about increasing the number of dies per package?

Avi Shetty: That is one of the primary ways to increase density. You can either increase die capacity or increase the number of dies per package. We intend to pursue both approaches.

Anton Shilov: How many dies per package do you think remain practical?

Avi Shetty: Today we are at 22. Future products will go beyond that, although I cannot discuss specific numbers.

Anton Shilov: What did previous generations use?

Avi Shetty: Depending on capacity requirements, previous products used 4-, 8-, or 16-die stacks. Of course, we are talking about a single NAND package in each case.

Storage-Class Memory, Optane, and Nvidia's Storage Next

Anton Shilov: What about storage-class memory?

Avi Shetty: Like Optane?

Anton Shilov: Not necessarily Optane itself, but something similar — something faster than NAND flash, yet capable of offering significantly higher density than DRAM at a lower cost.

Avi Shetty: Understood. Let me frame it from the perspective of the problem we are trying to solve. If you are asking whether Solidigm is developing a storage-class memory technology similar to Optane, then the answer today is no.

What we are focused on is addressing the requirements emerging from Nvidia's Storage Next initiative. The fundamental challenge is bandwidth. HBM is extremely fast, but it is also expensive and difficult to scale economically. As AI systems continue to grow, the industry needs additional memory and storage tiers that provide greater capacity at lower cost. That creates demand for NAND-based solutions that remain non-volatile while delivering improved latency and bandwidth characteristics.

We have not made any public announcements regarding storage-class memory technologies, but we continuously evaluate future technologies and architectural approaches.

Anton Shilov: So you are exploring concepts that could potentially bridge the gap between traditional NAND and memory?

Avi Shetty: We are evaluating a wide range of technologies that could help us continue delivering leadership products to our customers. When and if we have something to announce, we will do so publicly. At this point, however, we have nothing to disclose.

Anton Shilov: So storage-class memory is not currently a product category that Solidigm is actively pursuing?

Avi Shetty: If you are specifically referring to something similar to Optane, then no.

Optane was based on a fundamentally different technology. It was not NAND. It relied on a phase-change-memory-derived architecture and represented a completely different storage medium. We are not pursuing that type of technology today. What we are investing in is future NAND technology.

Anton Shilov: You think that future NAND technologies could eventually move closer to that space?

Avi Shetty: Exactly. Future NAND innovations could help narrow the gap between HBM, DRAM, and the next storage tier. That’s certainly one of the directions the industry is evaluating as AI systems continue to demand larger memory pools and greater bandwidth.

An external USB DVD drive can still be incredibly handy in 2025. With desktops and laptops now almost certain to eschew an optical drive, keeping one of these peripherals around will help you retain access to your collection of old software and media for years and PC generations to come. So, we've spotted some very attractively priced Cyber Monday drives on Amazon, and we just had to share: the External CD/DVD Drive for Laptop, DVD Player for Laptop, 8 in 1 USB 3.0 Ultra-Slim Portable at $26.99, and the CD DVD Drive External, Portable CD DVD Driver +/-RW Burner with 2.5" SATA, SD Card Reader and USB A Type C 2.0 Hub at $36.60.

The latter adds the convenience of SATA drive docking to the equation. Plus an External SUIDEK portable CD/DVD burner with USB Hub and M.2 Dock for $39, adding an M.2 SSD dock.

• Check out the SUIDEK portable CD/DVD burner with USB Hub and M.2 Dock
• Check out the BPAKDU Ultra Slim Portable External CD/DVD drive
• Check out the SUIDEK External CD/DVD DVD +/-RW Burner, Card Reader, and USB Hub

The BPAKDU drive gets you lots of media connectivity options. This attractive portable device, with a metallic honeycomb finish in four colors, can read and write optical media at CD 24X and DVD 8X speeds. That's not all, as it also offers a USB 3.0 hub, 3x USB 2.0 ports, SD and TF card slots readers, and a USB-C port.

Compatibility of the BPAKDU External CD/DVD Drive for Laptop, DVD Player for Laptop, 8 in 1 USB 3.0 Ultra-Slim Portable is also pretty extensive. For optical media, you can use CD±R/RW, CD-ROM, DVD±R/RW, DVD-RAM, VCD, and SVCD, the listing claims. Then, for systems/OS, you can plug this into Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, Vista, Linux, MacOS 10.6 or above computers.

Those who feel that some SATA docking functionality will be useful might want to look closer at the Suideck optical drive and dock. For your $36.60, you will have one portable device which can be used to read and write optical media at CD 24X and DVD 8X speeds. Again, there's a basic USB hub built in with 2x USB 2.0 ports, a USB-C port, plus SD and TF card readers. Extra appeal comes from the SATA 2.5-inch slot atop, which can be used for quick access to your old laptop hard drives or SSDs in what was once a very popular form factor.

This product listing isn't specific about things like DVD±R/RW, DVD-RAM support, but the exact same list of system/OS support is given: Windows 11, 10, 8, 7, XP, Vista, Linux, MacOS 10.6 or above.

All of the deals look like useful and bargain-a-licious Prime Day purchases. For $26.99, you can get the External CD/DVD Drive for Laptop, DVD Player for Laptop, 8-in-1 USB 3.0 Ultra-Slim Portable, and it will read/write most of the common optical disks you will have lying around from the 2000s.

If your wants/needs expand to 2.5-inch SATA drive docking, then the $36.60 gets the CD DVD Drive External, Portable CD DVD Driver +/-RW Burner with 2.5" SATA, SD Card Reader and USB A Type C 2.0 Hub is going to be hard to resist.

If the requirements expand a further stage to needing an M.2 SSD dock, the Suideck portable CD/DVD burner with USB Hub and M.2 Dock for $39.99 is the ultimate Swiss Army knife of portable external optical drives. We're also happy to see both brands' peripherals score 4.3/5 or better on the Amazon reviews, as we haven't tested these ourselves.

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Also, you can join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

We're keeping a close eye on all the best SSD discounts during Amazon's 2026 Prime Day sales event and keeping a constantly-updated list here. A new SSD is one of the simplest and most effective ways of improving your PC's performance, be it by increasing boot times, boosting load speeds, or just adding capacity for storing games. Buying SSDs is not as cheap as it used to be, but there are still savings to be had, especially on newer drives.

That's because external factors, such as tariffs and geopolitical issues, along with chip shortages, are pushing prices upward. In fact, it appears that shortages driven by AI data centers could persist for the coming decade. That means prices will go up significantly in the foreseeable future. Luckily, for now, there are discounts available on some SSD models.

As always, you'll need to stay alert when you're choosing SSDs, as not every drive is born equal and worthy of your money or a place of honor in your PC or PS5. We're constantly combing through the best deals across multiple retailers, selecting the best of them based on the in-depth knowledge we've gained from our thorough reviews, extensive benchmarks, and comprehensive historical price analysis. Factors like the drive controller, the type of NAND (QLC or TLC), and the presence of DRAM can all affect the performance and price of your drive.

Many of these drives are listed on our SSD Benchmark hierarchy, so you can see how they stack up to the competition. You can also track the latest SSD prices, even if they are not on sale. We also have a list of the best hard drive deals you can get.

Best SSD Deals: Quick Links

• Amazon: Best SSD deals on Amazon
• Amazon: Save up to 34% on Crucial SSDs
• Check out the best HDD Deals: Best Hard Drive HDD Deals

Best SSD Deals

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Best External SSD Deals

SSD Deals: What to Look For

• SATA or NVMe: SSDs either use the SATA or NVMe interface, with the latter being as much as six times faster (or more). All 2.5-inch drives are SATA, but M.2 drives could be either NVMe or SATA interface, though the latter is now rare. If you have a desktop or laptop that was built in the last 5 years, it almost certainly supports NVMe, which is faster. As SATA is old news, most of the best SSD deals are on NVMe drives.
• 2.5-inch or M.2: Most internal SSDs are either 2.5-inch or M.2 form factor. 2.5-inch drives connect to SATA ports and can replace old-school mechanical hard drives. M.2 drives look like RAM sticks and plug into dedicated M.2 ports. You won't find that many deals on 2.5-inch drives, but they can be useful for bulk storage as many motherboards have a ton of SATA ports but only two M.2 slots.
• PCIe 3, 4 or 5: If you're buying an NVMe SSD, you can choose among PCIe 3, 4 or 5 interfaces with speeds increasing from a maximum of around 3,500 MBps sequential reads and writes to 8,000 MBps and 14,000 MBps. At this point, PCIe 4 drives are mainstream and offer the best value. PCIe 5 drives are extraordinarily expensive, require a newer-gen platform that supports them, and also generate a fair amount of heat. We're seeing the best SSD deals on PCIe 4 drives which is the best standard for most people.
• Capacity: Price increases have upended the market in recent months, so it's going to be tricky to find a decent 2TB NVMe drive for less than $140 this Black Friday, with high performance models going for even more. 4TB drives are an even worse proposition, costing $250+, with some reaching over $400. If you really need to save money, a decent 1TB drive can still be found for $70 or $80.

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Also, you can join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

If you've got a Nintendo Switch 2 and need more storage, the Samsung P9 Express microSD Express Card is now just $39.99 at Amazon, down from $79.99.

● Check out this deal on Amazon

With sequential read speeds of up to 800 MB/s and write speeds of 200 MB/s, the P9 is much faster than your average microSD card. This unique format for Switch 2 means you can store more games on the go, without needing to install and uninstall titles whenever you want to play them.

Flash storage is suffering from the AI shortage, but this $39.99 deal is just $7.50 shy of the best-ever price we've seen on this drive, which was $31.50 in March.

As you can see from our testing data, the Samsung P9 Express isn't the fastest microSD Express card on the market, but that's because this is a budget card that won't break the bank. It's a good bit cheaper than many other options, especially thanks to this discount.

The P9 is our best budget microSD Express card pick in the 256GB category, offering reliable performance and strong durability. It also comes with a pretty generous three-year warranty, where most rivals only offer one year. Samsung offers protection against water immersion, temperature changes, and even X-ray exposure (we're looking at you, airport scanners).

The card also features a Host Memory Buffer to boost data transfer speeds, as well as Dynamic Thermal Guard to prevent overheating and throttling.

This is the best price we've seen on this drive in a while, and it isn't likely to improve as Prime Day continues, so grab yourself a bargain and boost your Switch 2 storage before it disappears.

More Prime Day Tech Deals

Best Tech and PC deals | Best gaming PC deals | Best RAM combo deals | Best 3D printer deals | Best RAM deals | Best gaming laptop deals | Best monitor deals | Best Wi-Fi Router deals | Best GPU deals | Best SSD deals | Best hard drive HDD deals | Best CPU deals | Best gaming chair deals | Best PC building tool deals | Best PC peripherals deals | Best filament and resin deals | Best motherboard deals | Best CPU cooler deals | Best PC case deals | Best Dell and Alienware deals | Best USB charger deals | Best gaming and productivity laptop deals under $1,000 | Best laptop PC deals

Also, you can join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.