To assemble a comprehensive IP portfolio that would cover everything from essential technologies to sophisticated manufacturing methods quickly, as well as to ensure that its patents overlapped with those of other 3D NAND manufacturers to enable it to attack Micron, the firm asserts YMTC opted for a rather simple, yet effective strategy: It poached engineers from Micron, then made them patent either standard essential inventions or inventions that closely resembled those they worked on while at Micron.

To leave Micron without being asked questions, its former employees cited a broad range of personal or family reasons for their resignations and even did not update their LinkedIn profiles to reflect their new roles at YMTC. These employees had confidentiality obligations that continued after termination of their employment and proscribed them from using, disclosing, or possessing Micron’s confidential information. Meanwhile, Micron did not really investigate the whereabouts of its former employees and "had no reason to suspect YMTC itself" of planning to use its confidential information because "YMTC did not have any material market share in the industry.”

We are all used to cut-throat competition on the memory market as leading producers of DRAM and NAND try to win market share from each other and maintain profitability at the same time. These companies have broad cross-licensing agreements to neutralize direct patent wars that can result in devastating injunctions that could paralyze fab operations and eventually lead to assured mutual destruction. However, this does not seem to be the case for emerging competitors from China, ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Yangtze Memory Technologies Co. (YMTC), both established in 2016, which are increasingly attacking Micron in various courts, perhaps making pre-emptive strikes to avoid the destiny of their Chinese counterpart, Fujian Jinhua.

Using Micron's 3D NAND know-how against Micron

In its lawsuit against YMTC, Micron asserts that Yangtze Memory's patent campaign against Micron largely relies on patents that were granted to former Micron employees. Furthermore, Micron alleges that former employees brought its 3D NAND know-how to YMTC and subsequently developed patents covering related or overlapping technologies, which essentially means that Yangtze Memory has built its patent portfolio using Micron's intellectual property, which is why Micron claims that YMTC patents belong to Micron and therefore cannot be used against it.

"For example, these individuals include Daesik Song, Wenxi Zhou, and Hua Tan," Micron's lawsuit reads. "Each of these employees owed Micron contractual obligations to keep trade secrets confidential, had access to certain of the Micron Trade Secrets further described below while employed at Micron, and on information and belief, each joined YMTC shortly after leaving Micron. Each of these employees also regularly accessed one or more of the Trade Secrets that were located on servers in Boise by accessing Micron's highly confidential technical materials relating to its test and/or production nodes."

Micron's allegations in the new complaint go well beyond simple claims that its former employees brought manufacturing expertise to YMTC, something that happens often. The company alleges that YMTC systematically obtained confidential 3D NAND and memory technology from former Micron engineers and incorporated that knowledge into its manufacturing processes starting from its 64-layer 3D NAND, memory products, and, most importantly, its patent portfolio. Micron says it began to uncover the alleged scheme after YMTC sued it for patent infringement in California in November 2023, when it noticed that several patents asserted against it named former Micron engineers as inventors.

In its complaint, Micron identifies a number of its former employees who subsequently became inventors on YMTC patents, including Hongbin Zhu, Jun Liu, Yushi Hu, Qian Tao, Changhyun Lee, Daesik Song, Wenxi Zhou, and Hua Tan. According to Micron, these engineers had access to different classes of confidential technology that covered a broad range of 3D NAND-related know-how, including high-aspect-ratio etching, replacement gate processing, multi-deck connections, pillar shaping and cleaning, and memory I/O circuitry, among others.

Patent records independently confirm an important part of Micron's allegations: several former Micron engineers later became inventors in YMTC patents that YMTC eventually used against Micron. In general, this does not prove any misappropriation: engineers routinely change employers and continue to invent in their areas of expertise, but Micron alleges that some of these patents cover inventions conceived or developed while their inventors still worked for Micron, which is why it is asking courts to transfer ownership of these patents from YMTC to Micron.

One of the clearest examples involves Hongbin Zhu, who left Micron in September 2017 and subsequently became an inventor in numerous YMTC patent applications. One family originates from the international patent application PCT/CN2018/101482, filed on August 21, 2018, and includes three patents. Micron's complaint alleges that these patents relate to technology Zhu 'learned of, worked on, and/or conceived while at Micron' and asks the court to transfer their ownership from YMTC to Micron. The same family also includes two additional patents that YMTC asserted against Micron in its California infringement lawsuit. Micron has already challenged ownership of these two patents in that litigation and claimed that Zhu invented the underlying technology while employed by Micron and had assigned his rights to the company.

Daesik Song provides another connection between Micron's allegations and YMTC's patent enforcement campaign. Song previously worked at Micron on memory I/O technology and later became an inventor on a patent titled 'Double Data Rate Circuit and Data Generation Method Implementing Precise Duty Cycle Control.' YMTC asserted the '851 patent against Micron in the Eastern District of Texas, yet Micron now alleges that it is actually the rightful owner of the patent because Song's invention-assignment agreement transferred inventions conceived during his Micron employment to Micron. The company is therefore asking the Idaho court to transfer legal title to the '851 patent from YMTC to Micron.

The Song connection also extends beyond the United States. In Europe, YMTC owns European patent EP 3 909 047, which covers the same invention as the '851 patent, and uses it against Micron in its UPC in Düsseldorf and U.K. litigations. Thus, YMTC is enforcing different members of the same invention family against Micron in Texas, the UPC, and the U.K. while Micron alleges that the U.S. patent from that family actually belongs to Micron. That does not automatically mean Micron owns the EP '047 since the U.S. and Europe are different jurisdictions, but it demonstrates how Micron's ownership allegations intersect with YMTC's international patent campaign.

There are additional connections. Former Micron engineers Yushi Hu and Qian Tao are named as inventors on two patents that YMTC asserted in California, while Jun Liu, Qian Tao, and Yushi Hu are all inventors on another patent asserted against Micron there. Changhyun Lee is an inventor on US 11,468,957, also part of YMTC's California case. Meanwhile, Wenxi Zhou appears on a YMTC patent family that covers barrier layers for word-line contacts, including US 12,094,767.

The European cases provide a somewhat narrower connection. Of the three European patents YMTC is asserting through the UPC and UK proceedings, EP 3 909 047 is directly relevant because it names former Micron engineer Daesik Song. The other two — EP 3 850 660, which names Qinxiang Wei, Jianhua Sun, and Ji Xia, and EP 4 236 650, which names Zilong Chen and Xiang Fu — do not name any of the former Micron engineers identified in Micron's complaint. Meanwhile, YMTC has also filed eight patent cases against Micron in China, three in Beijing and five in Shanghai, although we have not found a reliable public list of the eight Chinese patents involved, so it is not yet possible to determine whether they include Chinese patents of YMTC's inventions in the U.S. and Europe.

To sum up, the list of patents and YMTC engineers reveal a much more complicated dispute than an ordinary patent fight between two memory manufacturers. In less than a decade, YMTC has built an international patent portfolio and is attempting to enforce it against Micron across the United States, China, Germany, the UPC, and the U.K. Several of the patents used in that campaign are assigned to engineers who previously worked for Micron. Furthermore, Micron now alleges that at least some of those inventions were conceived while at Micron or using its trade secrets, so at least in some cases these patents belong to Micron, according to the company's complaint.

In short, Micron's main allegation is not that YMTC obtained its manufacturing know-how through former employees, but that some of this know-how was ultimately converted into YMTC intellectual property that YMTC later used to sue Micron itself. Hence, if Micron proves to the courts that YMTC's inventions are in fact Micron's inventions, then the whole Yangtze Memory campaign falls apart. However, the decision by the Munich I Regional Court looks rather alarming for Micron, as the company has so far failed to persuade the court that it not only did not infringe any YMTC patents, but that the very patents in question were obtained illegally.

All-out war

YMTC sued Micron in the Northern District of California in early November 2023, alleging that Micron's 3D NAND infringed eight U.S. patents. In early 2024, YMTC brought three additional patent cases against Micron in Beijing, then followed up with another California lawsuit in July that asserted another 11 U.S. patents against Micron’s 3D NAND and DDR5 products. In September 2024, YMTC expanded its Chinese campaign with five more patent cases in Shanghai. The dispute became global on October 6, 2025, when YMTC simultaneously launched another wave of litigation, asserting eight patents in the Eastern District of Texas, three patents in the U.K., three European patents before the Unified Patent Court in Düsseldorf, and five patents before the Munich Regional Court.

By then, what had begun as an eight-patent U.S. dispute had evolved into a multi-jurisdictional patent war covering dozens of patents and some of Micron's most important NAND products. Hence, Micron had to start responding. On October 18, 2024, the company filed a counterclaim alleging that it is the true owner of the US 10,879,254 and US 11,581,322 patents (more on this later). Then, almost two years after YMTC first sued Micron, the company filed the case on October 7, 2025, asking the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to issue a declaratory judgment of non-infringement concerning YMTC patents, which essentially means that Micron asked the court to rule that its patents did not infringe certain YMTC patents. These actions were barely a defense from YMTC's all-out patent war.

However, having spent nearly three years primarily defending itself and challenging YMTC's patents, Micron decided to respond more vigorously, which it did in its lawsuit filed with the Boise, Idaho, court on September 15. In the new lawsuit, Micron alleges that YMTC systematically obtained Micron's 3D NAND manufacturing know-how through former Micron engineers and then incorporated that information into both YMTC's manufacturing processes (64-layer, 128-layer, 232-layer, and subsequent nodes) and its patent portfolio. The alleged trade secrets cover multiple aspects of contemporary 3D NAND production, including high-aspect-ratio etching, replacement gate processing, multi-deck connections, pillar formation, and other manufacturing techniques.

Micron claims that its former employees who had access to this information later worked on similar technologies at YMTC and became inventors in YMTC patent applications. More importantly, some of these patents or their family members were subsequently used by YMTC against Micron, which essentially means that YMTC used patents granted to Micron's former employees against Micron itself. In many cases, YMTC allegedly poached Micron engineers who had previously developed and patented certain technologies at Micron, then tasked them with working on similar technologies and filing new YMTC patents covering essentially the same technical solutions. As a result, Micron now claims that several of the underlying inventions actually belong to it.

Back in Europe, Micron launched its own patent offensive against YMTC and companies that sell products which allegedly use the disputed technologies. In July, Micron sued YMTC in the Munich Regional Court, where it named Apacer, Lexar, and Ultron as co-defendants. In addition, it took a separate U.K. High Court action targeting YMTC alongside its partners Apacer, Lexar, and TeamGroup (note that TeamGroup is one of the SSD makers that from time to time uses different memory and even controllers on the same SSD models).

The German ruling

Before we proceed with a rather unprecedented decision of the Munich I Regional court, let us explain the difference between the patent and utility model as neither the U.S. nor the U.K., nor Canada, support the utility model system.

A patent protects major technical inventions across process technologies, tools, and materials for up to 20 years, but it requires a rigorous step-by-step patent office examination that typically takes years and significant expense to obtain. By contrast, a utility model protects incremental, practical mechanical or structural improvements to physical products for a shorter duration (usually 5 to 10 years). It is granted rapidly within months and at a fraction of the cost because it involves a lower inventive threshold and skips substantive examination prior to registration. While most patent offices register utility models without checking whether the idea is actually new, the validity of a utility model remains uncertain until enforcement. This is where YMTC prevailed to a degree that nobody expected.

In fact, YMTC has so far failed to gain any substantial court victory in the U.S., but it scored its first major victories in its German litigation against Micron in September, when the Munich I Regional Court ruled that Micron infringed two YMTC German utility models and granted injunctions against the company. The two utility models — DE 20 2020 006 166 U1 and DE 20 2021 004 551 U1 — cover 3D NAND-related to staircase structures and barrier layers for word-line contacts, respectively. The injunctions prohibit Micron from offering and selling products that infringe the two utility models in Germany. Meanwhile, the court has adjourned decisions on three infringement actions: it did not reject the other three, but simply has not resolved them.

Normally, this would not be a problem for Micron's clients, as unlike injunctions by the U.S. ITC, these rulings in the European Union typically have no effect on downstream entities, so Dell, Lenovo, and other PC OEMs can continue selling PCs containing violating hardware. However, it is possible that this particular decision could affect Micron's downstream partners, effectively prohibiting them from selling systems with Micron's 3D NAND inside. As a result, the injunctions could disrupt sales of PCs, SSDs, servers, and other products containing the affected Micron NAND in Germany.

Micron has appealed the decisions and is challenging the validity of the rights, so the September rulings represent first-instance victories for YMTC rather than the end of the dispute. Three other Munich cases brought by YMTC — including one that involves a European patent — have not yet produced infringement decisions. Yet, the existing decision shows that courts can side with Yangtze Memory and rule that Micron uses YMTC's intellectual property illegally.

Normally, this would be a 'local' problem for Micron. However, it is important to mention that some of the technologies and patent families involved in the European litigation overlap with those asserted in the United States. Several of them name former Micron engineers as inventors.

In fact, both German utility models on which YMTC just won injunctions appear to belong to patent families that involve former Micron engineer Wenxi Zhou, with corresponding U.S. patents being used by YMTC against Micron in Texas. This becomes particularly important in light of Micron's new allegations that former employees brought its 3D NAND know-how to YMTC and subsequently developed patents covering related technologies. If YMTC can win a litigation in Germany, can it also prevail elsewhere using the same patent families?

Summary

The conflict between Micron and YMTC emerged amid the escalating U.S. – China semiconductor confrontation. In October 2022, the U.S. imposed sweeping restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment and technology to China, and in December 2022, the U.S. Department of Commerce added YMTC to its Entity List, which severely restricted the company's access to American fab tools. China responded with pressure on Micron: in May 2023, the Cyberspace Administration of China concluded that Micron had failed a cybersecurity review and prohibited operators of critical information infrastructure from purchasing affected Micron products.

The commercial conflict between the two memory makers eventually moved into the courts, with YMTC accusing Micron of patent infringement and Micron largely defending itself rather than launching a comparable patent offensive of its own. Micron’s new complaint in Boise, Idaho, may explain this strategy: the American memory maker not only seeks to defend itself against YMTC's infringement claims, but also alleges that some of the patents YMTC is using against it incorporate Micron’s confidential technology or actually belong to Micron itself. But while Micron can potentially prevail in the U.S. and perhaps in Europe and the U.K., China represents a different challenge, as the legal battle between the two memory makers may well be considered a part of the broader geopolitical confrontation between the U.S. and China.

As for this first CD player hardware release for consumers from Sony. It wasn’t perfect, of course, and Wikipedia points out one particular limitation of the CDP-101: It had just one DAC for both left and right audio channels due to the high cost of these converters. Without sample-and-hold circuitry, this meant the stereo channels were approximately 11 μs out of sync.

Before CDs, home hi-fi setups of the era were typically built around vinyl records and compact audio cassette tapes. For a full set of separates, an enthusiast would also add a radio tuner, an amplifier, plus speakers - of course. Users of these older established pre-recorded audio media would have to cope with music affected by various imperfections over time. Vinyl sound quality would be a battle to maintain against the challenges of dust, scratches, warping, and wear. I remember pre-recorded cassettes had other problems, the major one for me being the variable quality of the tapes used by the distributors.

So, CDs came with many attractive promises, most importantly in the context of the early 1980s – providing digital music data that was read by a laser and wouldn’t wear. CDs also offered near-instant track selection, skipping, and replay. But most consumers would have to wait a few years: firstly for the price of player hardware to approach an acceptable level, and secondly for CD albums to become the norm for new releases and classic remasters.

Sony worked with CBS to have 50 CD albums on the shelves when the CDP-101 debuted in Japan. You’d think that six months later, when Philips joined in, and we saw the worldwide launch, that the catalog would have grown. Surprisingly, the ‘western’ launch was backed by just 16 titles.

It wouldn’t be until the mid-1980s when landmark DDD releases arrived and player prices dipped to much more acceptable levels that CDs would become established as a hi-fi staple. At around the same time, we started to get computers with built-in CD-ROM drives, but these would only start to become common from the early to mid 1990s and the dawn of the multimedia PC era.

If you are a retro tech fan who would be interested in buying a Sony CDP-101 before they all end up in museums, we noticed that you can buy them on eBay. At the time of writing, there were several of these 1982-vintage CD players for between $600 and $800.

Like the Black SN850P, which is a Black SN850X made with a heatsink and for the PS5, the 850P is made for the console. Its heatsink is excellent, and it would fit right into your desktop PC, too. We wouldn’t recommend shucking it for use in a laptop, but theoretically it could work there as well. Our main concern would be the pricing, which is a bit steep – this is a nice drive, but you’ll pay a premium for it.

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P Specifications

The Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P is available at the same capacities as its WD Black SN850P forebear: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. This also matches the original WD Black SN850X and its later 8TB SKU. Prices at the time of review for the Optimus GX Pro 850P are $309.99, $609.99, $1,139.99, and $2,249.99. These prices are well above the $234.99, $494.99, and $1,019.00 that the Black SN850P is currently demanding. We think the prices will come down on the Sandisk drive, but be aware of the comparable alternatives when making a purchase.

The drive can reach up to 7,300 / 6,600 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1.2 million random read/write IOPS. This performance is at the top for a Gen 4 drive and, frankly, is capable of delivering an excellent experience even for heavier workloads. The drive’s warranty is standard at five years with 600TB of writes for every TB of capacity. The Optimus GX Pro 850P supports data-at-rest encryption through TCG Opal v2.01, but this is not explicitly listed for the SN850P, likely as this model is designed for use in the PS5.

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P Software and Accessories

Sandisk fully supports its drives with downloadable software. For the Optimus GX Pro 850P this includes the Sandisk Dashboard, which is Sandisk’s version of WD’s Dashboard, and Acronis True Image for Sandisk. The former is an SSD toolbox with all of the expected features: drive health and SMART monitoring, firmware updating, performance testing, etc. Acronis True Image is OEM-licensed software used for backing up files and imaging drives.

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P: A Closer Look

The Optimus GX Pro 850P is designed to specifically fit into the PS5 with an effective heatsink. The bare drive underneath is single-sided at 1TB and 2TB but double-sided at 4TB and 8TB. For that reason, the rated height is larger for the latter two SKUs. In general, this should not be an issue for fit in desktop PCs. The heatsink itself is finned for extra surface area for better heat dissipation and should keep the drive cool even under harsh conditions. It does not have RGB, unlike the WD Black SN850’s heatsinked SKU.

The drive label gives some additional information, such as a rating for 3.3V / 2.8A. This is ~9W, which matches the drive’s highest reported power state. This is certainly higher than the ~5W we see for many DRAM-less drives, which have half the flash channels on top of not having DRAM to worry about, but it is not enough to be a problem with this heatsink.

The Optimus GX Pro 850P has a relatively standard SSD layout with an SSD controller, a DRAM module, power management circuitry, and two NAND flash packages. The larger, double-sided versions of the drive will have more NAND flash packages, with two additional packages on the back. We’ve covered the controller and its iterations in the past. The DRAM, for what it’s worth, is DDR4, which is serviceable for the role volatile memory plays on an SSD: mostly as a metadata cache. The one caveat here is that our 2TB drive only has 1GB of DRAM, which is one-half the usual and likewise one-half of what we had on our 2TB WD Black SN850X sample. In practice, this should have no impact on intended workload performance and could potentially reduce cost a small amount.

The flash is potentially more interesting, as it could be the expected BiCS5, or it could have been updated. The 8TB WD Black SN850X uses BiCS6, and it can make sense to cycle in newer flash later on in a product’s lifetime. The Optimus GX Pro 850P is essentially in that line. What we can say for sure is that the flash on here was manufactured more recently than the flash on the Black SN850X samples we’ve reviewed at both capacities – newer in production date, not necessarily in generation – but the performance is close enough that there would be little perceptible difference even if it were generationally different. This drive is at the edge of what you can get out of this controller technology and Sandisk could also choose to tune it specifically for this performance range, so at the end of the day one could say this is, effectively, equivalent to the WD Black SN850X with BiCS5 TLC flash.

We believe our sample is still using BiCS5 anyway – the coding’s sixth character “C” implies that – but that statement applies to any potential BiCS6 swap. In this case, moving to newer BiCS5 means a higher I/O rate, 1,200 MT/s to 1,600 MT/s. The former is plenty to saturate a PCIe 4.0 link with an eight-channel controller like the 850P’s, but putting in newer flash makes sense from a supply perspective. Higher MT/s flash can have lower latency and potentially better power efficiency when run at a lower MT/s, but we don’t believe either is a motivation here. Real-world impacts are, again, minimal, with minor exceptions that might not exist if we were comparing to a current Black SN850X.

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Comparison Products

The Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P is Sandisk’s take on the WD Black SN850P, which in turn is a PS5 version of the Black SN850X, so we have to compare it to that latter drive. The stiffest proprietary competition is from Samsung with the 990 Pro. Alternatives with DRAM but different hardware include the Crucial T500, the Adata Legend 960 Max, the TeamGroup G70 Pro, and the Inland Gaming Performance Plus. To keep things honest, we also want to compare faster DRAM-less drives that have historically been great for the PS5. These include the Addlink A93 (4TB) and the WD Black SN7100.

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.

Is the 850P a good game drive? In our estimation, yes. It beats the original Black SN850X, due in part to firmware maturity and/or the newer BiCS5 – we would expect these two to be comparable if the Black is or has been updated – and it is also faster than popular DRAM-less options like the A93. In general, we think going with something DRAM-less, like the A93, is a good way to save some money if you’re buying an SSD just to host games. This approach extends even to the Black SN7100, which struggles on this list against the largely DRAM-equipped competition, as it still scores pretty well. We consider 45µs or better to be excellent for load times.

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.

For general application use, we are a little more disappointed. The 850P ends up in the middle of the pack, although its results are still quite good. This will beat most DRAM-less drives, although it falls behind the Black SN7100, as that drive uses very responsive BiCS8 flash. This makes it clear that the 850P is using older BiCS flash, which doesn’t have the same latency edge. This isn’t the worst trade-off if you’re looking for a full-fledged SSD with eight flash channels and DRAM – this drive will sustain better over time and through heavier workloads. Again, anything at or below 45µs for latency is good in our book, so this would be perfectly suitable as an OS drive.

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 850P should be, by most accounts, the definitive PS5 SSD. We’ve had the Black SN850X as our best SSD for the PS5 for quite a long time, although the SN850P is the PS5-specific model. The Black SN850X simply delivers a similar experience to the SN850P at a lower price point. Why is this the best SSD for the platform? Well, you get top-tier Gen 4 performance with reliability and an excellent heatsink. All of this still applies to Sandisk’s 850P.

Now, a DRAM-less alternative with half the flash channels – which means it runs cooler – like the A93 seems to be more sensible. It’s less expensive, and the PS5 doesn’t benefit from more performance than it provides. The argument here is therefore more on reliability and, possibly, consistency. The 850P can manage more flash at once – which actually is ideal for larger capacities, including 2TB for this generation – and it also has DRAM.

Many enthusiasts still want DRAM as it can improve performance and endurance. Keep in mind that our A93 sample is the 4TB model, which its controller can address thanks to a revision made for that purpose. A four-channel drive is still at its best with up to four dies per channel, or 16 in total, which works out to 2TB with 1Tb dies. Going past that doesn’t really deliver more performance, and having an eight-channel controller is preferable at higher capacities. A stronger argument would be this: the 850P is a quality, mature product that could act as an investment. Considering that a 2TB Black SN850X bought at its lowest price beats the stock market right now, that’s not as crazy as it once sounded.

Our take is that, for a PS5, you really can get anything. If you’re set on a quality drive, though, this one is basically as good as it gets. You’re here for the numbers, though, and it only wins in transfers to the drive, and not by much. That’s valid, but with more wear and a fuller drive, it is more likely to maintain peak performance for longer. So, don’t buy this drive for faster game load times or FPS, because you won’t get that here.

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.

Our DiskBench test gives a good measure of real-world performance with a mixed file load, with Gen 4 expectations around 2 GB/s for copies and writes and 4 GB/s for reads. Writes are going to be slower than reads and can help cap copy performance. The 850P does nothing unusual here, coming in at numbers close to these. We tend to put the most weight on copy performance and, here, the 850P manages to come in second behind only the T500. This makes sense as the T500 has newer flash with more planes, which helps it eke out more bandwidth. The Black SN7100 also has newer flash, specifically a newer form of BiCS, which keeps it competitive. Still, the 850P impressively beats the Black SN850X by a significant amount – perhaps due to firmware maturity and/or newer BiCS5 – and the 990 Pro as well.

This is an important result because most of what people use storage for ultimately comes down to transfers like these. Files between drives. Backups. Updating software. You’re not going to have a lot of transfers going on at once with a high queue depth, and if you’re working with smaller files, you are not going to get near the theoretical throughput. So, the 850P certainly earns the mantle of being a high-end Gen 4 drive. On the other hand, even the DRAM-less A93 is not that much slower. If you’re someone who does a lot of transfers, the added time could add up, though.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

The 850P performs very closely to the Black SN850X in ATTO, as expected. We see no real anomalies here. The drive is very consistent, which makes for a reliable user experience regardless of workload type. It is easy to notice, however, that the 850P and Black SN850X have weaker performance between the 512B and 2KiB block sizes, closer to the Legend 960 Max and WD Black SN7100. We would chalk this up to the controller technology for the WD and Sandisk drives – they all use proprietary ones with the same foundation – with the Legend 960 Max being the singular SMI-based drive.

We’ve found historically that drives may show up weaker here in ATTO as indicative of a trade-off. This is because, generally, we think in terms of 4KiB – a typical cluster and sector size that is used for performance metrics everywhere – which is a logical page downstream from the 16KiB physical pages that modern flash uses. Handling smaller reads/writes could increase memory load and can increase latency. However, focusing on 4KiB and larger block sizes makes more sense for a variety of workloads, and performance is not the only factor. A manufacturer also has to consider power consumption and wear, for example. So there may be good design reasons for this behavior.

If we move on to CDM to see performance at 4KiB, at a typical queue depth of 1, the 850P is average with reads and on top with writes. Anything at or below 45µs for reads is pretty good, and the drive competes well. The SN7100 is in a class of its own with its BiCS8 flash. For writes, which are often less important, we see strong numbers from most drives. The DRAM-less A93, the SMI-based Legend 960 Max, and the proprietary 990 Pro are on the weaker end. Generally speaking, this does not indicate a problem with the drive at this level and could be a facet of the controller, the flash, or both, often also as a trade-off. What we can say is that the 850P is stellar here, which certainly makes it more attractive for use in a NAS, for caching, and for workloads that are not found in the PS5. That’s not a knock – it simply illustrates the drive’s heritage and underlines that this drive could be good anywhere.

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.

We’ll start with the 850P’s fastest mode in the cache: over 6.46 GB/s for just over 92 seconds. This is a 595GB cache, more or less exactly matching the Black SN850X. A drive with 3-bit TLC cache can handle up to one-third its actual size, so this is smaller than what’s possible but still large in the grand scheme of things. It’s more than suitably large to cache even large file writes, which means it can be used for things outside of gaming. This is reinforced by the post-cache speed, where it’s writing to the native TLC flash at a respectable 1.6 GB/s. This doesn’t sound like much given the speed of drives today, but it would be at or above the best Gen 3 drives in this mode while generally having a larger and faster cache.

Samsung’s 990 Pro is in the same boat, providing consistent performance outside the cache but looking slow compared to the steady state speeds we see with other drives. In part, this is due to the flash being used on it, as well as the WD/Sandisk drives. Newer flash has more planes and lower latency, both of which can boost throughput. Some drives, like the Inland Gaming Performance Plus, alternatively have smaller caches, which allow the drive to maintain higher sustained speeds. The same goes for the Legend 960 Max. Speed is also not everything, as not all drives write as smoothly in their post-cache modes. Maintaining responsiveness can help a drive feel spunkier when it hits this slower state.

If we take all of this into consideration, the 850P actually has some interesting applications. You could use this as a NAS drive, for example. Generally, we think the Inland Gaming Performance Plus – or the updated Performance Plus – would be better, as a super large cache leans more towards everyday consumer workloads. However, the 850P is steady enough with still sufficient speed. It would probably provide a better experience than the T500, especially as it has twice the flash channels, so it can manage better at high capacity. So, yes, this is a PS5 drive, but its heatsink and performance profile are such that you could use it as a workhorse drive as well.

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.

The 850P has a heatsink, so it’s not going into a laptop, and concerns about power consumption are a little less important. The presence of the heatsink also helps keep the drive cool, so throttling is also not a big concern. Still, you could choose to remove the heatsink, and maybe you want to toss this into a small form factor media machine. In those cases, the 850P’s efficiency – which lands in the lower half of the pack – is sufficient but not great. It’s better than the SM2264-based Legend 960 Max and E18-based Gaming Performance Plus, which are good baselines, but falls behind newer drives and technology.

Our feeling here is that a high-end Gen 4 drive should get at least 400 MB/s per watt, which is generally the case. DRAM-less options can target much higher and are often a better choice if you’re worried about heat or power consumption. If you are going for a high-end drive, ideally you have a heatsink. The one the 850P comes with is very effective, with us measuring a maximum temperature of 54 degrees Celsius. This is very far off from throttling and, frankly, it is a fantastic result.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P Bottom Line

The Sandisk Optimus GX Pro 850P brings no real surprises. If you were expecting it to be a WD Black SN850P – which itself is just a Black SN850X with a PS5-compliant heatsink – with a Sandisk badge, then you won’t be disappointed. Technically, there are some firmware optimizations possible for a drive destined to be used in PS5s, but we’ve found that any such changes have little impact on overall performance. The 850P is a drive with mature hardware and firmware, and that’s the main story here. It’s a reliable, consistent, well-performing drive that will rock the PS5 but is also good in regular computers.

Our biggest complaint is probably that the 850P can be bested by other drives in any given category. There are less expensive drives with similar performance in the PS5. There are drives that will be better in a laptop, even assuming the 850P’s heatsink is removed. There are even drives that beat it on the desktop in some areas, or are less expensive. Frankly, it feels like a premium drive, and that’s long been the case for the Black SN850X and its progeny. This is also true of the Samsung 990 Pro, its direct competitor, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If you want a rock-solid drive that can do anything, look no further. If you have a specific application in mind or want to save some money, there are other options.

Considering how much people value their data and worry about storage stability, we think the Optimus GX Pro 850P does have a place. It’s a no-nonsense drive that gets the job done with a proven track record. The heatsink is very effective, and the drive itself doesn’t really struggle with any one workload. While it is designed for the PS5, it would be plenty happy in an enthusiast’s desktop. Not everybody needs a Gen 5 powerhouse. We recommend it for the discerning buyer who wants something fast and reliable without having to guess what hardware is inside some generic brand’s drive.

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According to a Digitimes report, the court ruled on Sept. 18 that Micron did infringe YMTC’s 3D NAND technology patents in two instances. The injunctions could restrict Micron’s supply in Germany and impact the broader European NAND market. Micron said it disagreed with the court ruling and has already filed an appeal. It is also challenging the validity of the related patents in separate legal cases across various countries.

YMTC filed the lawsuit that won the recent injunctions in late 2025 at the Munich 1 Regional Court, opening five cases involving four German utility models and a European patent. The court granted injunctions on two of the utility models with 10-year protection periods — DE202020006166U1 (case No. 7O12615/25) and DE202021004551U1 (case No. 12614/25) — and adjourned the others. The injunctions are only first-instance rulings and can be suspended if Micron successfully appeals at the Munich Higher Regional Court.

The ruling is the latest development in a years-long dispute between the two memory makers that started in 2023 when YMTC sued Micron in California, alleging violations of eight 3D NAND architecture patents. The dispute has since snowballed into a multi-front war involving over 20 patents, with suits and countersuits on both sides. The cases cover patent infringement, declaratory judgment, spyware, libel, false advertising, and invalidation actions, and have been filed in courts across China, the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and in other parts of Europe.

Micron has vehemently denied any wrongdoing and has filed multiple patent invalidation challenges since 2024, the first of which came after YMTC dragged the company to court in China over related issues. Seven of the disputed patents have already been declared invalid, and Micron has said it will continue pushing to safeguard its intellectual property.

3D NAND is a flash-memory storage technology that stores data in products ranging from smartphones and SSDs to enterprise storage systems. Unlike older planar NAND, where memory cells are arranged side by side on a flat surface, 3D NAND stacks cells vertically in multiple layers, allowing manufacturers to pack more storage into a given area while increasing density and lowering cost per bit. Modern NAND chips can contain hundreds of these layers, making the architecture and manufacturing techniques behind them commercially valuable intellectual property.

The Micron-YMTC fight is playing out against the backdrop of the much larger technology dispute between the U.S. and China. Washington has tightened restrictions on China's access to advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment and other chip technologies, while Beijing has placed export restrictions on many critical raw materials.

• Check out the Samsung P9 512GB deal on Amazon

The Samsung P9, one of the best microSD Express cards available, offers blazing-fast sequential read speeds of up to 800 MB/s. That performance is enough to ensure games on your Switch 2 load quickly, and gameplay stays smooth. Samsung does not explicitly state the sequential write speed; however, microSD Express cards in the 512GB class generally offer sustained write speeds of up to 300 MB/s.

High write speeds mean faster data transfers and game installations. Still, 300 MB/s is more than enough for most Switch 2 owners to install large games and updates with little waiting time. In normal usage, the Switch 2 reads more data than it writes, so high read speeds are always a plus.

The Samsung P9 512GB is an incredible steal at $99.99, especially since Amazon typically lists it for $149.99. In fact, $99.99 is the lowest price this card has reached in the past three months, and it's a rare event given the ongoing flash shortage. Even Samsung’s own website currently sells this exact card for a staggering $199.99, making Amazon’s current offer stand out even more.

Deals like this are few and far between, especially for a microSD Express card of this caliber and capacity. If you are running out of space on your Switch 2 or want to prepare for the wave of incoming AAA titles, the Samsung P9 512GB is a smart investment since you are paying 20 cents per GB, the lowest price available right now. Act fast before it's gone.

As an example, the 30.72TB model trades around 4TB of QLC for 800GB of pSLC, a ratio closer to 5:1 than 4:1. The other two configurations put aside 400GB or 1.2TB with a cost between 6% and 20% of the QLC capacity. “No dedicated SLC NAND is required,” as this uses a “software-defined media configuration,” DapuStor said. Announced last month during FMS 2026, the drive still lacks pricing, a named customer, and a general availability date.

Typical consumer QLC drives have a pSLC cache that fills with super-fast performance, with the data later transferring over to QLC. However, this pSLC mode is dynamic and variable in size. DapuStor’s implementation uses a fixed region sized by the operator, and the regions are exposed as individual block devices to the host. The J5060 is also higher capacity, from 15.36 to 122.88TB, and in the U.2 form factor for PCIe 4.0 x4. Endurance is rated at 0.5 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day) over five years. The stock 30.72TB model is rated at 30,000 random-write IOPS at 16KB. Its write latency is 35 microseconds.

The capacity trade-off improves what QLC is worse at, random writes, by more than seven times, DapuStor said. It also says average 4K random-write latency is below 8 microseconds. The pSLC has over 25 times the program/erase cycles of the QLC region, although without region-specific DWPD or TBW numbers. DapuStor achieves this with three firmware changes: die-level isolation, optimized SLC reserve allocation, and region-aware I/O scheduling. The high-performance region targets workloads that benefit, namely “database journals, write-ahead logs (WALs), and metadata caches.” The idea is that this drive configuration precludes the need for specialized SLC drives where failure could be an issue; however, you still end up with a dead dual-mode drive on a failure.

The NVMe specification has defined this arrangement since 2019, with an NVM Express presentation at FMS 2019 claiming the goal was to “enable one SKU to be configured by customer for their use case.” An FMS 2019 example showed that some media units run as a small fast region, while the rest run at full density. A prior drive with the same idea, via a Phison firmware split and a host driver, was the consumer Enmotus/Phison FuzeDrive P200 with our 2021 verdict stating that “excessive pricing isn’t for everyone.” Enmotus wound down the same year. It’s also possible to mod a QLC drive to SLC, as we covered in 2024. The difference here is that DapuStor hands the host a second and separate block device with storage software control.

Competitors have other solutions. Sandisk’s bet is on Direct Write QLC on its UltraQLC platform, “which eliminates SLC buffering by enabling power-loss safe writes on the first pass,” Sandisk said, but there are still performance differences, according to our own reporting. Alternatively, Micron’s solution offers a separate cache drive in its XTR. The drive uses 176-layer TLC entirely in SLC mode and is rated at up to 35 DWPD. The drive acts as an optional write buffer for arrays of Micron’s 6000-series SSDs. For reference, Micron rates the XTR at 15 microseconds for QD1 writes.

Product promises are valuable, but any full comparison requires seeing the drives in actual use. Questions remain specifically regarding DapuStor’s drive, as pSLC region specifications are lacking. It is uncertain what commands the drive employs and whether the region split is modifiable live; usability depends much on the undemonstrated storage software. More details for the QLC-based, PCIe 5.0 sibling R6060 would be nice, too. Utilizing multi-bit flash in a single-bit, SLC mode for performance or endurance reasons is not a new idea, but balancing those with the increasing need for capacity remains a challenge.

Homolab compared the 1TB QLC-based iPhone 18 Pro Max with a 512GB TLC-based iPhone 18 Pro. While both storage types perform fairly similarly in 4K read tests, the QLC model falls behind by 38% in a low-queue-depth mixed workload, scoring 8,168 compared to 11,285 for the TLC model. Under heavier workloads, the gap narrows, although the TLC storage model still maintains a 12% advantage.

The drop in performance is even more apparent when it comes to sustained write tests. The iPhone 18 Pro Max uses a fast SLC cache that can deliver speeds of up to 3,000 MB/s. Once that cache is exhausted, a secondary TLC-based buffer takes over, averaging around 578 MB/s. When both cache buffers are exhausted, the phone has to write directly to the underlying QLC NAND. At that point, sustained write performance can fall to 79.4 MB/s, with speeds occasionally dropping as low as 25.6 MB/s.

That is significantly slow and comparable to the performance of many budget microSD cards (microSD Express cards are much faster). Things look even worse once the storage starts filling up. At 60% capacity, the available SLC cache drops from 250GB to just 58GB. This also causes the secondary buffer to slow down to 396 MB/s, while direct QLC writes average just 45 MB/s and occasionally fall to as low as 1.1 MB/s.

It’s important to note that these are synthetic benchmarks and are meant to represent a worse case scenario. Users should not experience any performance issues during typical tasks such as web browsing, messaging, gaming, or taking photos. Any slowdown is likely to be noticeable only during specific workloads, such as 4K or ProRes recording, large file transfers, or data backup restores. Having said that, testing by Homolab does point to the trade-off involved in using QLC NAND for a high-capacity flagship smartphone, particularly for users who regularly deal with storage-intensive tasks.

For now, there are no details on CXMT's 3D NAND architecture, number of active layers, process technology, expected performance, or production capacity. Nevertheless, the report claims that CXMT has already discussed its NAND ambitions with prospective customers. One of them is said to be a recently established company that plans to use CXMT-made NAND devices in storage products aimed at AI and supercomputing applications.

It remains to be seen whether CXMT's 3D NAND project will eventually progress to high-volume manufacturing, but if it does, the initiative will take CXMT beyond its traditional DRAM specialization and directly into YMTC's territory. Until recently, China's two major memory producers had focused exclusively on their 3D NAND and DRAM realms where they have achieved quite a success. Yet, it looks like both companies want to become one-stop shops for DRAM and NAND — just like their bigger rivals Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix — as YMTC is reportedly exploring DRAM production.

While CXMT's alleged plan to build 3D NAND may look somewhat logical from business diversification point of view, it does not make a lot of commercial sense for now.

Or China's industrial policy?

CXMT is China's dominant DRAM producer and posted $22.41 billion in revenue and $11.57 billion in net profit in the first half of the year after years of bleeding money. Despite obvious success, the company is still considerably smaller than the Big Three memory suppliers, which means it has plenty of room to expand in the industry where it already has experience, process technology, fabs, and customers. Furthermore, AI gives CXMT an obvious reason to focus resources on advanced DRAM as well as HBM3E, which are arguably much more strategically valuable products than commodity 3D NAND.

That said, for CXMT, allocating resources to 3D NAND, which requires completely different process technologies, manufacturing expertise, and equipment, does not make much economic sense. However, from the Chinese government's perspective, turning CXMT into the country's second major 3D NAND producer fits almost perfectly within its semiconductor self-sufficiency plans.

CXMT was created with Hefei government money (which held a 37% stake in the company during its IPO) and received support from China's Big Fund, which means that federal and local governments retain control over the company and may shape its strategic decisions, which is exactly what they do. Whether or not CXMT can indeed become a decent 3D NAND maker is an entirely different question.

The important bit is that this drive still delivers what you’d expect. That means high performance, including sustained write performance, good power efficiency, and very low random read latency. These are the hallmarks of a drive that offers an excellent user experience. This is a very fast drive, just not the very fastest, but we make the argument that this is a deliberate trade-off for a drive with roots in an area where reliability is a bigger priority. For some, that might otherwise tip things in its favor. Regardless of your stance, though, its price in areas where it is available is competitive, and we can judge it by that.

Kioxia Exceria Pro G2 Specifications

The Kioxia Exceria Pro G2 is available in 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. These are the most popular capacities, with 8TB yet again out of reach due to rising prices. The drive can reach up to 14,900 / 13,700 MB/s and 2,300K / 1,950K random read and write IOPS at the highest capacity. Most of this performance is achievable at 2TB, which is likely the sweet spot.

The drive has the usual five-year warranty with up to 600TB written per terabyte. Encryption support is not explicitly mentioned, and for a model in this line, we would expect TCG Pyrite and software encryption support only.

For pricing, we are making estimates based on pre-tax listings in the EU. Kioxia does not officially distribute the drive at U.S. retail, and the Amazon.com listings you find may be imports. These come in at ~$190, ~$340, and ~$650. These estimates make it look downright affordable, with the 1TB and 2TB models well under the WD Black SN8100, and the 4TB is roughly at parity at the time of review. It would be more expensive to import the drive, of course. One reason Kioxia can keep the price of the drive down is that it manufactures the flash it’s using, and its competition there – Crucial dropped out of the market, for one – is reduced.

Kioxia Exceria Pro G2 Software and Accessories

Kioxia supports its SSDs with SSD Utility Management Software, or SSD Utility for short. This SSD toolbox includes a summary of the drive and system, a firmware update feature, drive health monitoring, a secure erase function, password protection, and a section for troubleshooting. For data backup, we recommend MultiDrive for Windows – there is a portable version available, as well as a bootable WinPE image – or Clonezilla for other operating systems.

Kioxia Exceria Pro G2: A Closer Look

This is a single-sided drive in the M.2 2280 form factor. Specifically, the 1TB and 2TB conform to 2280-S3-M, while the 4TB is 2280-S4-M. These are all single-sided, but the 4TB is slightly thicker at 2.63mm versus 2.38mm. This is because it needs 16-die, rather than 8-die, NAND flash packages to achieve 2TB per package. The resulting extra height should not be an issue in most cases but is worth noting for devices with specific limitations.

The rear label has the Physical Presence Security ID (PSID), which allows a security reset to the factory state with an unlocked drive. This fits in with our expectation above that this drive is TCG Pyrite 2.01 compliant. The drive reports support for commands that TCG relies on, but Kioxia does not explicitly advertise hardware encryption.

On the top of the drive, we see the Silicon Motion SM2508 SSD controller, a single DRAM package, and two NAND flash packages. We have covered the controller multiple times, and it has been paired with a range of flash, although the best-known model to use it is probably the WD Black SN8100. Both the Black SN8100 and Exceria Pro G2 are using 218-Layer BiCS8 TLC flash, but the former uses Sandisk BiCS while the latter uses Kioxia’s instead.

When we reviewed the Corsair MP700 Pro XT with Phison’s E28 controller, we noted that the E28 was supplied at one time or another with both types of BiCS. Our understanding is that there is at least one subtle difference between the two – in packaging, or so we’ve heard – and Sandisk has made it a point to emphasize its own flash on its drives. The launch E28 was faster than the prototype we previewed, but we expect firmware maturation was the most significant element. We would rather more carefully say that while Sandisk and Kioxia co-develop and share wafer output, downstream elements – die sorting, binning, package design, and possibly also how I/O speed is maintained – can differ. We wouldn’t lean towards one drive or another based on something like this, but must also point out that WD, Sandisk, and Kioxia all have their own firmware optimizations at play, which are generally more influential.

As for the DRAM, our sample has 2GB of LPDDR4X, but the exact memory will vary from drive to drive. This is not a huge consideration, but we do prefer LPDDR4/4X over DDR4 for even small power savings. The drive does have the correct 1GB-per-TB ratio of DRAM to NAND.

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Comparison Products

The Kioxia Exceria Pro G2, as a high-end drive, faces the stiffest competition we have on hand. This includes the fastest drives we’ve ever tested, the Corsair MP700 Pro XT and WD Black SN8100. We also have drives with the same hardware as the Exceria Pro G2, namely the Kingston Fury Renegade G5. The Crucial T710 uses the same controller but with Micron-made flash rather than BiCS. The T705 slots in as an example of an older high-end Gen 5 design. We also have the proprietary Samsung 9100 Pro, the more budget-oriented Lexar NM1090 Pro with older flash, and an InnoGrit-based offering from TeamGroup in the GE Pro. We are not comparing any DRAM-less drives like the Biwin Black Opal X570, as they are not in this class of drive.

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 Exceria Pro G2, being a high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD, is bound to be an excellent gaming drive. High bandwidth paired with the newest hardware is a win-win. Still, we like to qualify this with a 3DMark pass. Our finding is that the Exceria Pro G2 scores exactly where we would expect it to – right next to the Fury Renegade G5. These two drives have the same hardware, so no surprise there. The WD Black SN8100, which also has the same hardware, remains tied at the top with the Phison-controlled MP700 Pro XT. As we explained in the Black SN8100 review, this is because WD/Sandisk put some special magic in the firmware. Phison no doubt wanted to match that performance level, and actually did, but we have more than one SM2508-controlled drive to compare, which makes the SMI side of things more interesting.

Let’s look at the T710, for example. Same SM2508 controller but with Micron rather than Sandisk or Kioxia BiCS TLC flash. It’s a good performer, but clearly not as fast in 3DMark. The BiCS8 flash used on all of the fastest drives here has very low latency, which brings excellent results in many of our tests. Latency is, in fact, probably the number one thing enthusiasts look at with SSDs, with dreams of Optane-like performance. Consumer NAND flash, however, is simply not designed with that kind of ultra-low latency in mind. You are also usually bottlenecked elsewhere, to the point that improvements here lead to very little real-world value. Games load faster, sure, but there will be no improvement in FPS. That said, the Exceria Pro G2 will deliver a very good experience even in suboptimal circumstances, such as when the drive is very full.

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.

In PCMark 10, the Exceria Pro G2 lands a little bit above the Fury Renegade G5 – a good showing, considering they use the same hardware – but behind the MP700 Pro XT and Black SN8100. Performance is excellent in general, particularly for a drive that’s relatively affordable in its target regions. These numbers dwarf decent last-gen drives, with the Exceria Pro G2 scoring about 75% higher than something like the Crucial P5 Plus, for instance. That’s to be expected to some extent, as you have about twice the bandwidth with PCIe 5.0, but this drive also has significant improvements in latency.

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.

A PCIe 5.0 drive for the PS5 is overkill, but it’s still important to test to make sure there are no anomalies with the drive. It’s within 1% of the fastest drive in the PS5’s internal read test, so no concerns there. Depending on the price, it can also be beneficial to use a PCIe 5.0 drive in the console. Such a drive will be running at a lower link speed and will be more efficient and cooler-running. Newer drives will use new technology and hardware, which means improved operation even in older host devices.

We generally recommend using less expensive drives for the PS5, but something like the Exceria Pro G2 remains an acceptable option. Kioxia has also validated the drive against Sony’s requirements with its own PS5 testing, relevant if you are someone who prefers to trust a drive so thoroughly tested. It’s also an acceptable use of the drive if you’re buying it ahead of a future build, whether you catch a sale or are trying to avoid future higher prices.

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.

DiskBench is the Exceria Pro G2’s first misstep and worthy of further discussion since we know this hardware can do more. Read performance is reasonable – beating the MP700 Pro XT, matching the 9100 Pro, and coming close to the Fury Renegade G5 – but write performance is very weak. This also reduces the copy performance below even the 9100 Pro. This is almost certainly by design, in the sense that being conservative with writes is a trade-off. That can reduce wear and also keep thermal output to a minimum. For a retail drive with OEM/client origins, this makes a lot of sense. Obviously, you, as the user, don’t want slower writes, but we think most people would take reliability over burst write performance when push comes to shove.

This means the Exceria Pro G2 is not the drive to get if you want maximum performance, but it’s still very fast. It’s easier to put this into perspective when looking at the benchmark results as a whole. This requires you to look at write performance in our write saturation testing and also at heat output. To close out this section, though, we would point out that the drive still beats the GE Pro and NM1090 Pro in copy performance. We weigh copy performance most heavily for DiskBench as it’s a mixed workload. Those two are more budget-leaning high-end drives that may sometimes end up within a similar price range as the review drive, making any decision between them and the Exceria Pro G2 much easier.

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.

We start by looking at ATTO, which gives an idea of how the drive performs at different block sizes. We include the results on logarithmic graphs because that often puts things into perspective. For example, on the standard graph, the Exceria Pro G2 looks fine until it flattens at 512KiB and dips at 1MiB, while on the logarithmic graph it lags the MP700 Pro XT at small I/O, and the gap at larger block sizes is minimized. This lag at small I/O isn’t unusual, as drives with the same hardware, like the Black SN8100, show the same pattern. Both that drive and the Fury Renegade G5 are a little bumpy at larger block sizes, but the MP700 Pro XT is not. Likewise, the T710 is also pretty consistent. This means that the SMI controller and BiCS8 flash combination is less consistent with bigger I/O sizes, but this is only looking at a queue depth of 1.

If we turn to CDM’s sequential results, we find agreement that the Exceria Pro G2 is a bit weak with QD1 reads at 1MB. This is a fairly realistic workload, as transferring files around this size is common and would usually be at QD1. You can see that the MP700 Pro XT, with the same flash but Phison’s controller, leads everything else here, with only the 9100 Pro coming close. It’s able to get more out of the flash and reduce the overhead – it is simply better at extracting bandwidth, even at low queue depths. To some extent, this is a function of firmware and not hardware, by which we mean the Exceria Pro G2 is not likely physically deficient in any way. It may instead be optimized to provide a slower but reliable experience, perhaps in the interest of inducing less wear on the drive. Reads don’t directly wear flash, but you’re also reducing heat output with this sort of optimization. It’s often said that flash prefers heat, but that only applies to writes. You generally want a lower temperature during reads.

The one place the drive clearly trails its Fury Renegade G5 twin is with high QD random reads. This feels like the firmware may be holding something in reserve rather than being a strict hardware limit. The Exceria Pro G2 still has the excellent BiCS latency, though, coming in under 35µs for 4KB QD1 random reads. This is a fantastic result. It trails what WD and Phison can deliver, but it’s still exceptionally fast even by PCIe 5.0 standards. App and game load times are snappy, and there is a noticeable improvement over last-gen drives. We think this is a good trade-off as you’re more likely to be dealing with low QD random reads.

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 Exceria Pro G2 hits over 12.6 GB/s in its fastest state, writing for over 31 seconds with a ~400 GB cache. On a 2TB TLC-based drive, this is only a moderately sized cache, not the largest it could be, but certainly larger than what was common a generation or two ago. The cache is smaller than what the Black SN8100 and Fury Renegade G5 use and more in line with the T710. It’s also larger than the MP700 Pro XT’s, unsurprisingly the fastest steady state drive on the list. Once the cache is exhausted, the drive settles down to 2.0 GB/s or so, engaging a mixed state where it’s writing to TLC and also copying data over from the cache. It holds there for roughly 13 minutes before recovering to a steady 2.96 GB/s for the remainder of the run. While this is slower than other drives in its class like the Black SN8100 and T710, it needs to be taken in context. It’s almost double what the Fury Renegade G5 manages after 15 minutes, despite the shared hardware, and well ahead of the 9100 Pro. This leaves the Exceria Pro G2 in the middle of the pack but far from slow.

It may sound like we’re making excuses for the drive here, but in reality we’re trying to ram home the point that not all drives are designed equally. There are very good reasons to have a drive behave this way. Having a large pSLC cache, as some of the other drives do, has its downsides. It’s not always the best design from a wear perspective and can leave the drive more vulnerable in certain edge cases. Your drive might run faster for longer, but that’s under an unrealistic workload that’s potentially inducing unnecessary wear.

The Exceria Pro G2 is designed for performance, yes, but also to keep on working in potentially more hostile environments. It needs to be reliable, and that comes with some trade-offs. From the buyer’s perspective, we would say that a drive like this – if you’re weighing it against something like the Black SN8100 – is still a worthy buy if you’re throwing it into an always-on Linux box that needs to be responsive but not always blazing fast. Or, as is becoming more common, in an always-on laptop where you are developing or running routines with AI and don’t really care about WD’s Dashboard or Game Mode. Just be aware of the power caveats, which we cover next.

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.

One question the spec sheet raises: why is the 1TB Exceria Pro G2 rated for more active power than the 2TB and 4TB? Our DiskBench power test fits within the pSLC cache at any capacity, so it is not hitting a slower mode, and therefore the likeliest answer is duty cycle. The SM2508 controller has eight flash channels, and with sixteen dies at 2TB it can switch between dies on each channel, giving every die time to rest. The eight dies at 1TB get no such break yet are still capable of reaching most of the drive’s peak performance, so each one works harder. This should not be taken to mean the 1TB will run hotter, not least because it will run out of pSLC cache faster and hit the slower and lower-power TLC mode. It’s just a peculiarity of having a drive this fast with dense flash.

Power efficiency, in our testing, is a measure of work per watt, but it only tells part of the story. For that part of the story, the Exceria Pro G2 is average among all drives and below expectations for a drive of its class – see the Kingston Fury Renegade G5, which has the same hardware. Yet the drive proved to run as cool as a cucumber – 52C max, more than 30C below the drive’s 83C warning threshold. There are two reasons for this. The first is that, indeed, the Exceria Pro G2 has a heat-spreading label, which can be surprisingly effective. The second is that the drive is providing less bandwidth in the DiskBench test but also not pulling more power on average. This suggests that Kioxia designed this drive for OEMs, where you tend to have tighter thermal requirements. Kioxia’s own materials list the drive’s applications simply as “client desktop and laptop,” which supports our conclusion. Trading a little performance for reliability – with the assumption that running a high-end drive hotter in general is less than ideal – is reasonable here. The secret third reason is that our temperature logging comes from the Iometer-based write saturation run, which is sequential with a larger 1MiB block size. Historically we’ve found that mixed workloads, especially with smaller and random I/O, can push a drive a few degrees hotter than that.

The drive’s high idle power consumption supports this conclusion. We test idle in the worst case, that is, for enthusiast desktops where there is no power saving. OEM systems and especially laptops are more likely to have these features enabled. That’s part of the explanation. The other side is in the drive’s advertised power states. The non-operational states have enter and exit latencies that, in comparison to drives with similar hardware, are consistent with a drive that prefers to stay in a ready state, somewhat like WD’s Game Mode. Our speculation is that it may be tuned that way for OEM machines. If we had results from a workstation-oriented drive like Kioxia’s own XG10, which is a client OEM model, we might find more clarity here. Our guess is that having a drive that can potentially wake faster is desirable.

Nevertheless, we would expect the Exceria Pro G2’s idle result to be more in line with the Black SN8100’s. It’s possible this is platform-specific – the drive might react differently on, say, an AMD system – or simply that it was more reluctant to go to a lower power state for us.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and antivirus 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.

Kioxia Exceria Pro G2 Bottom Line

This is a solid drive that hits all the right notes for us. It has high-end PCIe 5.0 bandwidth, excellent BiCS flash latency, good power efficiency, and good all-around performance, including reasonable sustained write speeds. While it’s not really available in the U.S., its pricing in other regions makes it extremely competitive. We also like the fact that it runs pretty cool and appears to have firmware optimization geared toward reliability, which is always welcome if you intend to run a drive like this in a laptop, an always-on system, or another challenging environment. The drive also advertises the usual NVMe low-power states, so users who want a drive that stays available should be well served, provided power management is properly enabled on their platform.

Where the drive falls flat is in comparison to some of the other fastest drives around, like the Black SN8100, which shares its hardware. Some of these drives are just plain faster and even consistently so, matching or beating it in an array of tests. The Exceria Pro G2 does out-write its hardware twin, the Fury Renegade G5, in steady state, but other contenders offer better efficiency numbers and higher sustained write speeds. It sometimes looks like the Exceria Pro G2 is being held back, which, to be fair, is probably true. The design philosophy behind this drive is closer to what you’d find in an OEM or client drive, where reliability is a big concern. In our opinion, this makes the drive a great addition and alternative in the market. Many users would value this over raw performance, especially if it’s more affordable. If you’re in a position to get this drive at a competitive price, it’s worth weighing your priorities.

Personally, we’re fond of the drive for what it does differently while still delivering an excellent user experience. A PCIe 5.0 drive is still overkill for most things, and SSDs are rather expensive at the moment. However, if you want to invest in something that will carry you for a long time, the Exceria Pro G2 is a reasonable choice. We think a lot of users will have a better time with the Black SN8100 – it may be more readily available and beats the Exceria Pro G2 in some areas – but at this performance level it’s kind of hard to go wrong. We’d lean towards the Kioxia if you want something more focused on a reliable experience with a drive that just works without ever being slow.

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Sharge is offering the Disk Pro 2 in two varieties. There's the Lite model, with HDMI 2.0 (4K@60 Hz) and a 5W minimum operating power, and the Disk Pro Ultra (which we have in for testing) with HDMI 2.1 (4K@144 Hz or 8K@30 Hz), a lower 1.5W minimum power draw, and a faster card reader. Below is the full list of differences, according to the product page. The company even lists the internal chips, some of which you can see through its transparent top.

The Ultra model is likely to appeal more to professionals and gamers, offering faster card transfers and higher monitor refresh rates. But the main limitation here is the overall bandwidth, as both models are capped at a 10 Gbps interface, just like the original Disk Pro. That makes either model better as kind of a travel-friendly Swiss Army hub than something you'd want to use as your primary hub / dock all the time. Because any modern M.2 drive can saturate all available throughput by itself, before you connect any video or USB devices. But there's no denying the utility of carrying around a pocket-friendly SSD that also lets you connect to a monitor or TV, plug in a couple extra peripherals, and empty your SD cards without an extra hub, adapters, or cables.

At 3.65 x 2.33 x 0.531 inches (92.6 × 59.2 × 13.5 mm) without the cable, the Disk Pro 2 is slightly thicker and longer than the original Disk Pro, but still smaller than some standalone drives. Again, with its size and transparent top, it reminds me of an old-school cassette tape.

One thing that has definitely improved over the original Disk Pro is that Sharge has made the USB-C cable removable. This is good in part because you don't have to worry about the cable breaking over years of use. But also, particularly if you're going to use the drive's hub capabilities, you might want something longer than the included cable's sub-nine-inch length. And when necessary, you might want to plug the drive into a USB-A port. So having the option of using different cables is a big plus.

The cable is also designed to function as a lanyard, which can be handy. But it's held in place solely by the USB-C connection, so I wouldn't trust it for much more than hanging the hub up somewhere at home, so you know where it is when you need it.

In terms of ports, starting from the bottom edge, you get the main USB-C port, capable of passing through up to 80W of power, a full-size HDMI port (2.1 on the Ultra model we're testing or 2.0 on the lite model), a USB 3.0 Type-A port, and a 10 Gbps USB-C port that can handle up to 100W of power input (and pass through up to 80W for charging a laptop or other device). The previous Disk Pro included a second USB-A 2.0 port here as well, but it's been ditched in favor of the removable USB-C cable, which I think is well worth the sacrifice.

On the opposite (top) edge, Sharge has added an SD card slot and a microSD card slot. These are capabilities the original Disk Pro didn't have, which make the newer model a lot more versatile for content creators. Just remember the Ultra model offers up faster read and write speeds for the card slots.

Around back, there's not a lot to see save for the fan intake, but the back is also magnetic, letting you snap the drive onto smartphones that support MagSafe devices or Qi2 magnetic peripherals — it's just a physical mount, though, not receiving power. I've also found this feature handy for sticking the drive to a refrigerator or other iron surface so I always know where it is when I need it.

It's also worth pointing out that the fan in the Disk Pro 2 is smaller than on the Disk Pro. But there are larger cutouts for air intake on the sides for when the hub is lying on a table or desk, and the Pro offers a three-mode switch (off, on, and turbo), whereas the original's switch had two settings (auto and on). I appreciate the active cooling, and it will certainly be helpful if you're using most of the hub's ports and the SSD at the same time. But if you're mostly using the Disk Pro 2 solely for basic, bursty storage tasks, the 10 Gbps interface and an efficient SSD aren't likely to get warm enough to require active cooling. Of course, that will heavily depend on which drive you install in the enclosure, as well.

Testing with Lexar's 710 SSD

Sharge sent along its Disk Pro 2 Ultra with a Lexar 710 M.2 SSD (a PCIe 4.0 drive that's capable of about 5x the bandwidth of the hub itself), and installing it is about as straightforward as you'd expect. Use the small included screwdriver to remove a tiny screw on the side, and the SSD cover lifts off. Loosen the drive anchor post, install the SSD, tighten the post, put the cover back on, and reinstall the cover anchor screw on the side.

You can, of course, install your SSD of choice, and below the 10 Gbps interface cap, your performance will vary by drive. Still, since the company sent along the Lexar drive, we ran a couple of our external storage benchmarks, and the Disk Pro 2 Ultra performed well for an SSD in this class, just like the original Disk Pro.

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

The Sharge Disk Pro 2 Ultra does exceptionally well here, beating everything save for Corsair's USB4-based EX400U. Impressively, the 10 Gbps drive even beat the 10 Gbps X10 Pro on this test, proving available bandwidth isn't everything when it comes to drive responsiveness.

In this real-world bulk transfer test, Sharge's Disk Pro 2 Ultra lands in a comfortable fourth place, behind 40 Gbps and 20 Gbps drives, and one spot behind the 10 Gbps Crucial X9 Pro drive on reads. But on writes, Sharge's enclosure, running the Lexar SSD, again beats everything in this chart save for Corsair's USB4 drive.

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

Lastly, in this best-case-scenario synthetic test, the Disk Pro 2 lands in fifth place when it comes to reads, but fourth place on writes.

Again, the Disk Pro 2's performance on benchmarks will depend largely on what drive you put inside it. But it's clear that the SSD enclosure is capable of performing well, despite its 10 Gbps bandwidth limitations.

Pricing and Bottom Line

If all you really care about is dropping in a drive and moving some files around, there are plenty of cheap 10 Gbps enclosures, often on sale for $20 or less. But if you travel a lot with tech and like the idea of a drive enclosure that includes a data and video hub with PD power passthrough, the Disk Pro 2 offers a lot to like, with the Ultra version we tested capable of handling video output bandwidth as high as 8K at 30 Hz (or 4K at 144 Hz). And the inclusion of card reader slots makes the enclosure even more useful for creators on the go.

It's far from cheap, at $109 for the Ultra version we tested or $79 for the Lite version, which is still capable of 4K video at 60 Hz, but won't play as well with phones, due to a higher minimum power draw. But Sharge's devices often go on sale, and when this was written, the Late model was selling for $66.51 and $80.91, directly from the company. This is technically a pre-order price, as the enclosures are expected to start shipping on October 15th.

There are also enclosure / hub combos on Amazon and Newegg that promise similar functionality for less. But the ones I saw have generally poor reviews, are larger than the Disk Pro 2, and none of them look as pleasing or are as feature-packed as Sharge's design, with its transparent cover, active cooling, and MagSafe-compatible back. For those looking for portable connectivity and up to 8TB of storage in one device on the go, the Sharge Disk Pro 2 is in a class of its own, and easily earns a spot on our best SSD and hard drive enclosure list.

Goodram is not a new or no-name company, even if the “good RAM” moniker seems a little too on the nose. Instead, it’s a memory assembler in the EU with quite some history. This, in fact, makes it more approachable in comparison to a lot of the new names we have seen on AliExpress and increasingly on Amazon. We expect reliability or at least good support from the company, and the TBW on this one seems to reflect that this isn’t an ultra-budget drive.

On the contrary, performance was not just what we expected – considering we’ve reviewed many drives in this segment, many with the same or comparable hardware – but above. Sometimes only by a small amount, but the gaps are real. Anywhere performance mattered, it delivered. One expects trade-offs for that, but in fact the PX700 is very power-efficient, and the drive provides an excellent storage experience. The only downsides are sustained write performance – which is of little importance in most cases – and, unfortunately, the price. At the right price point, this would be a great pick for any device.

Goodram PX700 Specifications

The Goodram PX700 covers the most popular capacities of 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. Smaller drives can be popular for upgrades and basic boot usage, especially with how prices are now, but modern flash scales best at 1TB and up. 8TB drives are great as a larger storage solution but require a significant investment. The PX700 sticks to what will sell, predominantly 1TB and 2TB. At the time of review, these are priced at $346 and $418, respectively. These prices are high and probably point to a lack of stock more than anything else. While the 1TB price is double what it should be, at 2TB a drive of this type should be closer to $300. Naturally, one has to take into account the pricing volatility in an SSD market besieged by a NAND shortage, but we recommend looking in that range for this drive or one comparable to it with similar or the same hardware.

The drive is full-fledged Gen 4 with performance up to 7,400 / 6,500 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1 million random read and write IOPS at 4TB with only 820K write at 1TB/2TB. This is standard for the class and is more than enough performance for everyday tasks, gaming, productivity workflows, and more. The drive has the standard five-year warranty with up to 600TB of writes for every TB. The last part of that is worth a second glance because it indicates this drive can come with TLC rather than QLC flash, since TLC, aside from being faster, has better endurance than QLC. However, we have reasons to believe our sample has QLC, which we will point out where the evidence supports that reasoning. We want to emphasize that you should not assume what flash a drive uses based on TBW alone.

Goodram PX700 Software and Accessories

Goodram does not offer any specialized or custom software for its SSDs. You will have to rely on third-party solutions. Software for SSDs essentially falls into three categories: health management, performance, and data backup. SSD toolbox applications from manufacturers will usually cover the first two, with, typically, an OEM version of Acronis True Image for the last. For free alternatives, we recommend CrystalDiskInfo for health information, CrystalDiskMark for basic benchmarking, and MultiDrive for data backup and imaging. MultiDrive is made for Windows and has a bootable WinPE image, so for other operating systems you can opt to use Clonezilla instead.

Goodram PX700: A Closer Look

The PX700 is a single-sided drive at all capacity points. This makes it compatible with a wider range of systems and, if you need to cool the drive, it’s easier to tackle just one side of components. As it turns out, the drive runs cool enough that you probably don’t have to worry about this – check the Power Consumption and Temperature section below – but it’s still worth pointing out. The data on the rear label is standard, but we do want to say a little bit more about the listed manufacturer.

Wilk Elektronik is a Poland-based memory company, which makes this interesting, as that means the PX700 is a European-assembled SSD. Goodram covers the mainstream parts and IRDM enthusiast, although this is the first SSD from them that we’ve reviewed. As we are going to dig into the hardware in this section, we will say that the drive's silicon is sourced from Asia, as with virtually every SSD. If we say a drive is made in Poland, this means the drive is assembled, tested, and covered by warranty in Poland with an EU anchor. For some, that might be a positive factor in any purchasing decision.

Identifying the hardware here is half simple and half challenging. The controller is clearly the Maxio MAP1602, a four-channel, DRAM-less part that’s been a budget champion for quite some time. There is not much mystery there aside from maybe this being a later revision, typically used for higher capacities.

The flash is more difficult. We can ascertain that these are 512GB NAND flash packages from the “512G” – given modern flash is 1Tb or 128GB, four dies per package for a total of sixteen dies. That’s perfect for maximizing performance out of this controller. The “W2533” is likely the manufacture date of week 33, year 2025. All this indicates is that this is, at least, not older flash, although we already know it has to be 2,400 MT/s at a minimum to hit the specified performance.

It makes a lot of sense for the PX700 to use TLC flash, though, given the TBW and the fact that we’ve been seeing this controller with 232-Layer Micron TLC more frequently lately. The Biwin Black Opal NV7400 comes to mind. However, Goodram has access to YMTC flash, and that includes QLC. YMTC rather than Micron QLC is more likely, given the latter is in high demand in enterprise. Normally, you could use certain utilities to identify the flash, but firmware for this controller is often encrypted to avoid revealing the flash ID. It’s still possible to get around this with leaked MP tools, but otherwise the best way to identify it is simply to look at the performance. We’ll be doing that in this review with comparison drives to help back up the investigation.

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Comparison Products

The Goodram PX700 is in a tight spot with ample competition in today’s market. This has been true for some years now, but some more recent releases have turned up the heat. These would include the Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 with its fantastic random read latency, the Crucial P310 with surprisingly good all-around performance, and even the Samsung 990, which was a very late arrival. Existing drives with comparable hardware to the PX700 include the Acer FA200 with QLC flash plus the Biwin Black Opal NV7400, Addlink A93, and Inland TN470 with TLC. The last of these also uses a Phison controller rather than the more common Maxio MAP1602. Lastly, we have the budget-minded Kingston NV3, which is always looming in the background.

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 PX700’s 3DMark results are spot-on for a drive of this caliber, hanging out at around 40µs for latency with bandwidth over 700 MB/s. This level of performance is excellent for gaming, and the only drive that wouldn’t fall into that category is the NV3. The NV3 is still fast enough for a games drive and remains a good budget choice, but there are faster options like the PX700. We want to emphasize that the PX700 is better than it looks in this lineup because it’s effectively within range of all drives but one, the WD Blue SN5100.

Among the QLC-based drives, the WD Blue SN5100, 990, and P310 all notably score near the top. The BiCS flash in the first drive is known for its responsiveness and, yes, it will give you a small edge with game load times. However, the 990 is right up there with the P310, which means there is no shortage of viable options. Most slower drives, from a gamer’s perspective, will be last-generation or slower PCIe 4.0, which means it’s not hard to find drives that are very fast for games. This means that the deciding factor might lie outside of 3DMark performance, such as drive reliability.

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.

While the PX700 is merely mediocre against the competition in 3DMark – its absolute performance is quite good, though – its showing in PCMark 10 is better. This is again a scenario where the drives with TLC flash, including the TN470 with Phison’s controller, are underwhelming. This can be confusing to buyers who have relied on the mantra that TLC is better than QLC. There are reasons for the surprise here, although the general idea that benchmarking is often looking at ideal scenarios is perhaps the easiest answer.

These drives, whether TLC or QLC, rely on pSLC cache as much as possible to give you the best performance. This pSLC mode is not equivalent to native pSLC and is generally the same speed regardless of the flash type. QLC, however, tends to lead TLC in some ways and follow it in others. For example, QLC gets larger benefits from optimizations, so it may see advanced techniques first. This includes improvements to 4K latency. On the other hand, QLC has four planes when TLC has advanced to six. As we’ve seen with BiCS flash, which is four-plane against six-plane TLC from Micron and YMTC, fewer planes can lead to lower effective latency. The advantage of a higher plane count is in bandwidth but does not come without costs and drawbacks.

The PX700 is also faster than a QLC-based drive with the same controller, like the FA200. In that case, the FA200 uses twice as many dies – thirty-two – which puts more load on the controller. This can increase latency. In general, the idea has been that bigger drives are faster, which is certainly true in many cases. Larger drives will have more bandwidth and can reach higher IOPS due to improved parallelization. However, past four dies for each channel – this is where the PX700 falls, and the FA200 exceeds – you are increasing power consumption and overhead. So, the PX700 is in a sweet spot for how this benchmark tests.

We would go on to say that the P310, WD Blue SN5100, and 990 all beat the PX700. These are all QLC-based drives with a range of controllers. We’ve already explained the BiCS factor. Samsung’s newer QLC is also very good. The P310 has always been a bit of an outlier, as on paper its hardware shouldn’t perform as well as it does. Considering Crucial used to rely at least partially on proprietary controllers, we think this is a situation where they did a lot of optimization. WD and Sandisk also did this with the Black SN8100/Optimus Pro GX 8100 so there’s some “special sauce” at play. The PX700 being the best of the rest is a point in its favor, as those are the drives it’s competing with in the real market.

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.

For the PS5, we can recommend almost any drive if it meets the PS5’s minimum requirements in any real way. The PX700 significantly exceeds that, so the question is more about value. What does this drive offer that others don’t? For this category, this often means leaning towards drives with heatsinks and/or higher reliability. Reliability is a difficult quality to measure, although a warranty gives some peace of mind. As for heatsinks, you can always add your own. So drawing lines here becomes more difficult.

We would point to our Power Consumption and Temperature section below for some additional support. The PX700, as we will see, runs coolly, which is a big positive for the PS5. Performance-wise, it’s right up there with the other drives and only really behind the Blue SN5100. You don’t have to go with a big brand to get good results here, and the PX700 will serve you well.

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 PX700 does very well here, and we wanted to give some background on this test and what it means to put that into perspective. Whether you’re copying between drives or copying to and from the same drive, there are some universal principles. One is that there will be a bottleneck, and usually this will be on the write side of things, as drives write slower than they read. Flash memory, in particular, has to erase cells before they can be written again, which leads to some curious behavior under certain workloads. More generally, though, a write has higher latency – with flash again, this is due to the technology and how multi-bit cells usually need multiple write passes – and writes must be acknowledged, while reads just come from usually static media.

If you have drives that are of different classes – NVMe and SATA, or PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 3.0 – then you would expect the slower class of drive to be the bottleneck even if it’s on the read side. This is also universal, going back to the days when HDDs got faster as they got bigger. SSDs also generally get faster with capacity, but flash is so fast that these rules are no longer absolute. This is complicated by other facets of the technology like pSLC caching and TLC versus QLC flash, where with sustained writes you can have dramatic changes in performance. This is a problem because many people buy drives thinking mostly about transfer performance, and when they hit a low that’s nowhere near the box-rated speed, they panic.

Our DiskBench testing takes all of this into account as it’s closer to a real-world workload, including using different file sizes. Transferring a bunch of large files is fast. Copying lots of small files – and any veteran of hard drives will know this from backing up Windows or documents manually – can be very slow, even on SSDs. So we do a mix. Moreover, we’re doing an on-drive copy, which helps rule out external factors. Much of what you do on your system can be cached in system memory, which can give misleading metrics depending on what you’re doing.

What we’re leading up to here is that the PX700 is the fastest drive on the list for reads and not far off first place for copying. Considering it’s up against some of the best budget drives out there, that’s no mean feat. This is, again, a real-world workload and probably more meaningful than something like 3DMark is for game load times.

Yes, the difference between the best and the worst drive for reads is under 10%, but nobody wants to buy a drive and feel bad about how fast it feels. The PX700 feels like a premium drive – the weaker write performance here is real, but most of what you’re doing will be read-heavy – and if you’re building a PC for someone with it over, say, the Samsung 990, they won’t know the difference. That is a common refrain regardless, but it helps underline the value of reliability. People buy Samsung and WD/Sandisk for a reason. Given Goodram’s European basis, there is some reason to celebrate the performance here while also acknowledging it’s not a no-name brand from AliExpress.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

The PX700 has very steady performance in ATTO. We have no real complaints there. If we turn to sequential performance in CDM, we see more of the same. We would mostly look at QD1 reads for that, being a real-world metric, and it’s roughly on par with the NV7400 there. If we turn to random 4KB read performance at QD1, it’s a little bit further down the list but still hangs with excellent drives like the P310. Anything below about 45µs here is solid in our book. This drive should be quite responsive. If we were forced to be critical, we would point out that high QD 4KB write performance is low. Luckily, this is not a real-world workload for a drive of this type.

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 PX700 starts off in the pSLC cache mode, writing at 5.8 GB/s for over 86 seconds. Speeds are slightly higher for the first two seconds, something we have seen before with this controller, but ultimately we’re looking at a 500GB cache. This is Exhibit A of why we would identify the flash as QLC. 4-bit QLC flash operating in a 1-bit pSLC mode is trading four times the capacity for performance, which means a 2TB drive will generally have a 500GB cache at most. A 3-bit TLC drive could have a larger cache, although there is nothing precluding it from having 500GB, even if this seems hard to be coincidental.

A TLC drive with a smaller-than-maximum-sized cache would probably be able to maintain some speed, though. The PX700 immediately falls into a folding mode – it’s waiting for data to be moved from pSLC to the native flash – with an average speed of 163 MB/s. TLC flash can at times be this slow, but it’s less likely, and especially less likely if it has space to spare. Even the FA200, with the same hardware, is faster. The FA200 does have twice the flash, of course, but the controller is essentially saturated. Rather, the FA200’s cache speed of 5.54 GB/s is slower than the PX700’s – and this could be from having more flash – which means the post-cache speed will be higher. This reinforces the position that the drive is using QLC. Of course, we could have thrown the 2TB HP FX700 into the mix to further prove this point, but we think comparing a 4TB drive is a more valuable approach.

It goes without saying that this is the first real failing of the PX700 in our review. However, it’s expected of a QLC SSD with a massive cache. We don’t consider it disqualifying. You are not buying a budget SSD to hammer it with writes. On the other hand, the 600TBW per TB warranty makes you assume you could do that to some extent. Also, the lower performance here could creep up in a fuller-drive experience. We also can’t exclude the fact that some PX700s come with TLC flash. Which means, taken as a whole, you should assume QLC will perform like the TLC competition 99% of the time.

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.

The PX700 comes back into our good graces with very good results in our power testing. It’s essentially tied for second with the FA200, which is hardly surprising given the hardware similarity. Only the BiCS8-based WD Blue SN5100 pulls away from the pack. We would consider every drive on this list to be sufficiently power-efficient for laptop use, although the 990 is closer to the lower end of that range. Certainly 550 MB/s per watt or higher is an excellent result and indicates a drive that can be run without a heatsink most comfortably. As for idle pull – we test under desktop conditions, which can also match poorly-optimized power settings – the PX700 is not unusually power-hungry and, in fact, better than the WD Blue SN5100. That’s a bonus.

Temperature-wise, we have good news. Goodram touts the graphene label on this drive, which, in our experience, does actually help with cooling, especially on a drive with four flash packages. The PX700 in our testing peaked at 61°C, nearly 30°C below the initial throttling point, well beyond the 20°C of headroom we like to see. The MAP1602 does tend to be a hotspot more than alternatives like the Phison E27T on the P310 and TN470, but a heat-spreading label does help. In our estimation, this is a cool-running drive that would be great anywhere.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and antivirus 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.

Goodram PX700 Bottom Line

The Goodram PX700 is a model budget PCIe 4.0 SSD. It matches or exceeds all of the expected performance points; it's power-efficient, and it uses a simple single-sided design without a heatsink. The only problem is that a “budget” drive has to be affordable. Current prices in the U.S. for this drive leave something to be desired. However, if it can match or beat the prices of other drives in this class, it’s probably one of the better choices available. In part, this is because we’d be liable to trust Goodram over non-names – the TBW alone shows it means business – and, on the other hand, the drive actually outperformed our expectations. Aside from the sustained write performance, this drive really feels premium. You don’t need a Samsung, WD, Sandisk, or even Crucial drive to feel like you have next-gen storage.

Let’s look at what we mean by that for your use. Game and app loading times are heavily reliant on random and sequential reads at low QD. The PX700 does well there. You also may be transferring files a lot, and the DiskBench results are mighty. For your laptop or HTPC, you might want something that’s power-efficient and, if space is a concern, something that stays cool without a heatsink, and this applies to PS5 use as well. The PX700 ran cool in our test with just the graphene label and was very efficient. You’re not getting a shorter warranty with lower TBW, as with Samsung’s 990 or some QLC-based drives, and we know where this drive is assembled. It’s hard to look at this combination and not feel like it’s a stellar drive if you can find it at a normal price.

Aside from price, our only complaint would be sustained write performance. It’s pretty dissapointing, although we should point out that it’s also expected. The drive also has trade-offs here. Namely, its standard pSLC write performance is better than the 4TB FA200, and in the 2TB HP FX700’s ballpark, so you’re not getting nothing for that later drop. The PX700, in fact, is faster folding than the FX700, too. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t a big deal, as you should never hit that state – this drive should effectively be fast enough for a 1GbE network, if that’s a bottleneck – and having a bit faster peak performance does translate to better marks on some of our benchmarks. The drive could take a hit in some cases, such as when it's very full, in which case getting a drive with DRAM and guaranteed TLC flash could assuage your fears.

For most use cases, though, the PX700 is more than good enough and, in fact, punches above its weight in our opinion. It would be a good option for just about any type of machine. PS5, laptop, HTPC, desktop, you name it. Primary or secondary drive, just fine. You don’t even need a heatsink. The capacity range is solid – you’re not going to find 8TB on a drive like this – and you can bring your own software. Performance is good enough to overlook any QLC flash use, so our main problem remains the price. Get it down to the same ballpark as the other drives in our list, and you have a contender. We hesitate to put an exact dollar amount for that because SSD prices are volatile, to say the least, so compare it to comparable drives such as the ones we matched it against today.

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

● Check out this deal at Amazon

Looking at Camelcamelcamel's price data, we can see that this drive was hitting almost $700 just a few weeks ago. Several price drops since have meant that the 4TB Crucial T705 is now almost below $500 for the first time in February. Along with a decent price drop, this Crucial drive is now the cheapest Gen 5 SSD you can pick up, with the next-cheapest model, the Samsung 990 Evo Plus, $60 more expensive at the moment.

It's not even a fair comparison, too, as the entry-level 990 Evo Plus only supports PCIe 5.0 over two lanes, not four, meaning you're only getting Gen 4-equivalent speeds. The Crucial T705 is a high-performance drive that's much faster, and right now, much cheaper.

SSDs that offer Gen 5 speeds are a real step up over their slower Gen 4 counterparts. The T705 will offer you sequential read and write speeds of 14,500 MB/s and 12,700 MB/s, which is significantly faster than the fastest Gen 4 SSD on the market, the Samsung 990 Pro, which taps out at 7,450 MB/s. The T705 ships with 232-Layer Micro TLC memory modules and uses the Phison E26 controller.

It's also one of the fastest you can buy, period, rivalling the WD_Black SN8100, which hits speeds of 15,000 MB/s. That drive will set you back $659.99 right now, too, a significant increase compared to the deal on offer here. The Crucial T705 drive scored an Editor's Choice award for its sustained read/write performance at high speed, along with 4.5 stars in our review.

While we wished that SSD prices were back down to what we saw 18 months ago, it's good to see that high-performance drives like this one can still drop in price. The $502.51 sale price for this Crucial T705 4TB SSD is a seriously good one in the current market, and you won't be able to beat it for speed or price. Grab it at this price while you can.

Each of those drives is worth at least $400 today, if not more. We found the 980 Pro 2TB listed for $444 on Amazon and $499 on Newegg, which makes three of them worth between $1,300 and $1,500 together. The expansion card holding them is an Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 that retails for $79, so even if there were no SSDs inside, this would be a solid find. The card looks worn down but not quite beat up, while the drives honestly appear mint.

An expansion card like this allows you to install extra M.2 drives in your system by using an x16 slot usually meant for GPUs. Just three of the four slots on the card were populated, so there's a chance someone took out one SSD and threw this thing in the trash. If the original owner only ever installed three, they could've forgotten to check since the heatsink covers the drives underneath.

As for the thrifter, Sunny is from Kuwait City, and he frequents the largest flea market in the region called "Souq-al-Juma" — Arabic for "Friday Market." These open-air buildouts are common in Asian and Middle Eastern countries, but not all of them carry electronics. You usually have to visit the biggest venue on a designated day, since multiple flea markets are often propped up on the same day, to get the best, most relevant deals possible.

If you're lucky enough to score something similar, the NANDpocalypse might just feel a little less crushing. We don't know the exact internal condition or health of these 980 Pros, but 6TB for $30 is such an incredible find that you wouldn't even mind if they were roughed up. It's also the exact same capacity as another person found last year while dumpster diving, so technically they got a better deal, but those were 850 Pro SATA SSDs.

• Check out the deal on Amazon

The Samsung 990 series was launched earlier this year, right in the midst of the RAMpocalypse. The SSD is essentially a QLC-based version of the 990 EVO Plus. QLC SSDs can be a good choice for gaming, as it mostly involves reading data rather than writing it. QLC drives are slower than TLC, but frequently used data can stay in the faster pSLC cache if the drive has enough free space. The Samsung 990 also features the company’s PiccoloQ controller with V9 QLC Flash memory and is capable of full PCIe Gen 4 throughput.

In our testing, we found the drive to offer similar results to Samsung’s 990 Evo Plus and the 990 Evo in latency testing, while beating the 990 Evo drive in bandwidth and 3DMark overall score. It also managed to stay competitive with the Crucial P310, which is one of the best QLC-based drives on the market. The Samsung 990 is also a solid option for consoles, delivering bandwidth that puts it ahead of the 990 Evo and on par with or better than most budget PCIe 4.0 drives.

The Samsung 990 at $339.99 is a compelling option for those who are looking for plenty of fast storage without paying more during the current SSD price surge. The 1TB model is also selling at a discount if you do not require this much storage. Do keep in mind that this sale price is available for a very limited time. If you need a high-capacity PCIe 4.0 SSD, it may be worth grabbing before the discount disappears.

The Compact Terra Prime uses the same chassis as the aforementioned Strato V player and holds 2x enterprise-grade 123TB SSDs inside. We didn't get confirmation on what kind of SSDs these are, but we can infer from the specs that it's a pair of Solidigm D5-P5336 drives. It's the only SKU that makes sense; each of those is a PCIe 4.0 ultra-high-density NVMe SSD using 3D QLC NAND, likely in the U.2 form factor. Anyhow, the combined 246TB capacity can hold up to 4,000 standard 4K movies, or 2,300 "4K Cinematic" / 8K movies, or 6,800 HD movies.

To understand what 4K Cinematic means, you have to know that Kaleidescape is not just a manufacturer. The company also runs an online movie store that directly licenses master copies of films from major studios. The platform hosts extremely high bitrate content for purchase that exceeds most 4K Blu-rays. As such, the 4K Cinematic tier promises 110 Mbps video with 4:4:4 chroma subsampling, with no compression. You also get support for HDR formats such as Dolby Vision and lossless audio formats like Dolby Atmos.

Watching these movies requires a proprietary Kaleidescape media player. The server isn't necessary, since the company's latest Strato V comes with 960 GB of onboard storage to hold up to eight 4K Cinematic movies at a time. When you combine a player, a server, and a movie store, you get the absolute pinnacle of home video: Blu-ray's high fidelity and online streaming's convenience in one place. The Compact Terra Prime 246TB simply represents one enormous piece of the puzzle.

The server weighs just 4 pounds, or less than 2 kilograms, and measures out to 7.87 x 1.52 x 10 inches. It has two fans that cool the NAND at a maximum noise level of 20 dB. The back of the device has a 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port that Kaleidescape promises can download a 4K movie in just 4 minutes if you saturate its throughput. This matters because you cannot stream movies from the company's online store; they must be downloaded locally first as part of the uncompromising experience.

Once available, though, the server supports up to 25 instances of 4K playback simultaneously. That's more than even most full-fledged movie theaters ever do. The Compact Terra Prime 246TB is also constructed entirely out of aluminum. You'd expect that kind of build quality given what it costs. Kaleidescape didn't reveal an MSRP, but its 120TB SSD server currently costs $34,995. Doing simple math, the 246TB version should cost double, if not more. It's available now, but you can only purchase it through select Kaleidescape partners on a made-to-order basis.

The AI Agent NAS N5 Max-P495 can accommodate up to 200TB of local storage, making it useful for storing large amounts of data locally. When paired with the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, you can use this to run your AI agents like OpenClaw or Hermes Agent directly on your storage solution. This gives you privacy, ensuring that all your data stays on your machines, while the local storage cuts latency and helps you (and your AI) get things done speedily. Minisforum says that the N5 MAX-P495 is designed “as a centralized backed for data, models, knowledge, and long-running AI workloads.” It would also help cut or keep your AI inference costs in control, especially as agentic AI is known to use up 1000x more tokens compared to standard AI.

Now, if you need something powerful for your professional or creative workflow, Minisforum has the MS-S1 Max-P495 for you. Just like the NAS, this is an update of the company’s top-of-the-line MS-S1 mini-PC, which previously featured an AMD Ryzen AI Max 395+ APU. This device, which now uses the Ryzen AI Max+ Pro 495, is optimized for AI compute, with its processor delivering 55 TOPS from a dedicated NPU for a total AI performance of 131 TOPS, and support for various models from labs like Gemma, OpenAI, and Qwen. More importantly, it’s easily scalable, with four units easily deployable in a 2U rack.

This makes it an excellent alternative to the Mac mini and Mac Studio, which are in short supply because of the local AI boom. But even if you’re not into AI but just need something small that doesn’t compromise on performance, the MS-S1 Max-P495 can still deliver. You can order it with as much as 192GB of unified memory to ensure that you do not run out of RAM for 3D rendering, video editing, and even computational fluid dynamics. The 8060S on the older Ryzen AI Max 395+ is also quite capable for 1080p gaming, so we wouldn’t be surprised if you can comfortably play on this new mini-PC, too.

If you’re experimenting with AI and want something powerful to help run your models, the N5 Max-P495 and the MS-S1 Max-P495 are great devices to consider for your upgrade. Just make sure that your agents have proper safeguards so that it doesn’t end up accidentally deleting your entire home directory. Unfortunately, we don’t have pricing and availability for these two AI devices at the moment, but if you want to see them for yourself and you happen to be in Berlin, drop by IFA from September 4 to 8, 2026.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tools Needed To Install a PS5 SSD

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

1. Prepare your PlayStation 5 for installation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Prepare for SSD installation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Format the SSD.

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

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

Last year, when we pondered over the LTO shipment numbers, we contrasted the medium’s undeniable success with Elon Musk’s DOGE crusade to wipe it out. It was criticized and dismissed for being “old technology.” But there’s certainly life in this old dog, as there were 176.5 exabytes of compressed LTO tape capacity shipped in 2024. Shipments were thus up 15.4% vs. the prior year and hit new records.

There was a small dip in LTO capacity shipped in 2025, an aberration characterized as "bad weather" by the TPCs on social media. This modest 9% YOY decline meant that 160.3 exabytes of tape storage were shipped last year. However, “shipped capacity was higher than any other year in history save 2024 itself,” wrote an LTO program representative in an email to Tom’s Hardware. The latest figures also show LTO demand is back with a vengeance, with shipped capacity in Q1 2026 a stunning 57% higher than in Q1 2025.

“We are seeing unprecedented data growth combined with increasing cost, energy, and cyber resilience pressures across the industry,” said Hugues Meyrath, CEO, Quantum. “As organizations adapt to this new reality, tape is increasingly viewed as a strategic component of modern data infrastructure, delivering predictable economics and resilient long-term data retention at scale.”

Other contributors to growth, evidenced by the latest figures, were the market’s readiness for LTO-9 and LTO-10. The former is still being promoted by TPCs as a very worthwhile upgrade to stickers reliant on older generations. LTO-9 tapes support up to 18TB uncompressed or 45TB of compressed data according to the program companies. 2026 capacity shipment figures have also benefited from the early ramp of LTO-10. With these latest-gen cartridges up to 40TB of data per cartridge natively, or up to 100TB compressed, can be stored. Meanwhile, TPPCs are ensuring tape will continue to be attractive with roadmaps extending to LTO-14, which offers up to a gargantuan 576TB native capacity per cartridge, and can fit up to a touted 1,440TB compressed.

It is difficult to argue with the strong start for LTO shipments in 2026. The TPCs assert this is due to tape belonging “in every storage mix as an anchor against disruption.” LTO is also heralded as the storage medium possessing “the lowest cost per terabyte, provides excellent cyber-resilience, and is highly power-efficient.”

• Check out the Kingston NV3 on Newegg

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

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

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

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

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

Specifications

Design and accessories

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

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

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

Putting the tap in Tapsafe, with an app

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comparison products

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

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

Storage Testbed

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

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

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

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

Trace Testing - PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

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

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

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

Synthetic Testing CrystalDiskMark

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

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

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

Sustained Write Performance

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

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

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

Bottom Line

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

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

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

MORE: Best SSDs

MORE: Best External SSDs

MORE: Best SSD for the Steam Deck

Back in February we noted that this USB flash drive had some severe shortcomings, but was nonetheless an effort that we warmly applauded. There were three key drawbacks to this ungainly USB flash drive. Firstly, it is rather massive, and it looks roughly a foot (30cm) square. Secondly, by contrast, its storage is incredibly tiny at just 128 bytes (not GB, MB, or even KB). Lastly, according to our understanding of the technology, the data stored gets erased during the read process.

In the tweet-embedded video we get to see the unnamed USB Type-A gadget work its magic. Interestingly, as data is read to/from @dydt_Nao's device, LEDs in an attached 32 x 32 array glow a vivid red. Every LED corresponds to an individual magnetic core. We see Windows reporting the drive as having a 6.5KB capacity, but that is likely something to do with the Raspberry Pi Pico being used as an onboard controller. Towards the end of the video we get to see that the text has been successfully transferred from the drive to Notepad.

Not content with a mere text demo, @dydt_Nao follows up with a BMP image transfer. Monochrome bitmaps up to 32 x 28 pixels can be stored on this device. Perhaps a little of the limited device memory space (32 x 4) is used up by the image file header.

You can read more about magnetic core memory in our article commemorating the 75th anniversary of its patent filing by inventor and MIT electrical engineer Jay Forrester. Magnetic core memory earned its place as the dominant form of random-access storage in digital computers for two decades. Today it seems like a bizarre curiosity.

● Grab this deal at Amazon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheap memory =/= cheap tokens

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

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

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

Niche memory?

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

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

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

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

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

The hardest part

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

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

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

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

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

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

HBF remains a nascent technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

● Check out this deal at Best Buy

At this price, the drive works out to cost $31.24 per TeraByte. Yes, this is a crazy high price compared to several years ago, but that's not the current reality in which we reside. In today's storage market, it's actually a fair price per TeraByte compared to the competition. We have reviewed the 8TB Seagate Barracuda, so if you'd like to see more information on this HDD to help you in your shopping journey, then please check out our review.

The 8TB Seagate Barracuda isn't the fastest HDD out there. It's designed to be lower in price rather than offer astonishing performance; however, it's perfectly adequate in most situations as long as you're not looking for breakneck speeds. In our PCMark 10 benchmarking test, we use a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of our tested drives. You can see in our tables below that it isn't the fastest drive, but it does beat out some of the competition.

The Seagate Barracuda comes in a standard 3.5-inch metal chassis and is an SMR (shingled magnetic recording) drive with a 256MB cache and 5,400 RPM disk spin speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers the fastest transfer speeds available for HDDs and makes plug-and-play exceptionally easy.

If you're looking for a disk drive for use in a home server setup or media center, and want something on the cheaper side (cheaper for the current climate) then the Seagate Barracuda range is a one of the main choices available on the HDD market, however, being an SMR drive there are some drawbacks in certain operations, and Seagate only offer a shorter 2-year limited warranty with this HDD.

“Before the era when hobbies could be easily shared digitally, exchanging cassette tapes was an important way to share our favorite music and culture,” recalls the Disk Union press release. It goes on to ponder how this product release will “evoke a sense of nostalgia” for those who grew up with the original UD series. Perhaps naughtily, it even seems to encourage folks to indulge in making home recordings from vinyl. “Dub your treasured music purchased at a record shop, and enjoy it together with the unique texture and character that only cassette tapes can provide,” suggests the Disk Union marketing department.

Creating mix tapes is hinted at as a possible use of a pack of UD-60Us. Normal-position tapes (Type I ferric) like these are not the best for high-fidelity audio recordings. I always liked to use Chrome (Type II) or even Metal (Type IV) tapes for my own hi-fi mixes and recordings. Nevertheless, ferric tapes are ideal for 8-bit home computer tape storage. They would be perfect partners to a C64 Datassette, or for any tape interface you may have used with a VIC-20, Plus/4, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, MSX, BBC Micro, and so on. The square-ish digital pulses used to encode data to audio (and read it back) are actually in the sweet spot for ferric tape on low-end mechanisms.

Maxell UD tapes were originally launched in 1970 as a high-output, low-noise mass-market cassette line. Later in the decade, they moved to PX gamma‑hematite iron oxide, a purer and more advanced ferric formulation for higher output, lower noise, and pleasing frequency response. Sources suggest UD tapes were often chosen by major music labels for commercial pre-recorded cassette releases. Maxell UD tapes earned a place in cassette music lore alongside TDK SD and Sony HF rivals.

A wave of UD revivals began in 2016, with tapes marketed by Maxell in retro packaging. Last year, Maxell collaborated with Disk Union on the release of the first batch of UD-60U tapes to “a great response.” Now they’re back on sale, and they are priced at 990 yen ($6.25) each, or 2,900 yen ($18.28) for a triple pack. Denkyosha Co. is listed as the distributor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sandisk NAS 600 and NAS 800 Specifications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cole has so far tested 200 cards last year, meaning 84 microSD's have failed in the intervening months. While this might sound disastrous for any manufacturer, we should note that the testing conditions are quite extreme, and it’s rare that a user would find themselves in these circumstances. If you want to check out the raw data, Cole’s database is publicly viewable on his website, but he’s also shared some of his observations after three years of testing. First, he divided his microSD cards into three categories: consumer-grade, high-endurance, and industrial-grade. Consumer-grade microSD cards are the typical cards you can get off Amazon, while high-endurance models are often labeled as such (or some other similar wording). Lastly, industrial-grade microSD cards are those that are specifically designed for heavy-duty use and would often come with a data sheet and an endurance claim.

According to the test results, the average consumer-grade microSD withstood 10,000 program/verify/erase cycles, with PNY, Kingston, Delkin Devices, Lexar, and Samsung rounding out Cole’s top five brands.

Interestingly, Amazon Basics received an honorable mention, with none of the microSD cards being tested failing yet. They’ve been running for 788 days now, with 16,600 cycles and a total of 4.2PB of data written on them. The only reason they didn’t make the main list is that they’re technically generic or off-brand microSD cards and Amazon could replace the NAND chips used in these cards anytime, thereby making the survey results moot. There’s a separate shorter list for high-endurance and industrial-grade cards, given that the sample size is just smaller and the latter is significantly more expensive than all the other microSD cards available here.

He also listed some of the worst performers per category from popular brands, like ADATA, Gigastone, Micro Center, Silicon Power, and, surprisingly, SanDisk, although Cole avoided no-name brands, since most users don’t expect much from them.

Doing all these tests simultaneously and continuously is no joke, and we see this in Cole’s setup. He runs a single Beelink Mini-S with an Intel N95 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD, five TRIGKEY Green G4 mini-PCs and one TRIGKEY K-N100 with an Intel N100 CPU, 16GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD, and an AOOSTAR mini-PC with an Intel N150 CPU paired to 12GB of RAM and a 500GB SSD. Aside from these mini-PCs, he also has an MSI GE62VR-7RF Apache Pro laptop with an Intel Core i7-7700HQ, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, a Lenovo IdeaPad Y850 laptop with an Intel Core i7-3630QM, 8GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, and an ASUS ROG Strix Hero II GL504GM laptop with an Intel i7-8750H, 32GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD.

Running this experiment can get expensive as Cole needs to purchase all the microSD cards himself (unless someone donates them), especially at a time when memory card prices are skyrocketing. Aside from that, he also needs to purchase and maintain all that testing hardware. Although these are either relatively affordable mini-PCs or used gaming laptops, the cost of acquiring and running all these units will eventually stack up.

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At this price, the drive works out to cost $43.74 per TeraByte, which is high compared to the price per TB of larger HDD drives, but you're looking at a lower cost per unit if you're going to purchase multiple drives for backup redundancy. 8TB may not seem the greatest size, seeing as you can get 28TB capacities, but those drives cost considerably more in the current economic climate.

The Seagate IronWolf comes in a standard 3.5-inch metal chassis and is a CMR drive with a 256MB cache and 7,200 RPM disk spin speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers the fastest transfer speeds available for HDDs and makes plug-and-play exceptionally easy. The IronWolf HDDs have some of the fastest available speeds for NAS operation and are designed for 24/7 operation in a NAS storage environment, with lower noise and vibration.

If you're looking for a disk drive for use in a home server setup or media center, and want reliable, hard-working drives, then the IronWolf range of HDDs from Seagate is perfect for the job. Designed for durability and continued 24/7 operation, the IronWolf HDD comes with a 5-year limited warranty from Seagate.

Backblaze's quarterly reports compare whichever drives are available at the time, and the authors argue that approach stacks old drives against young ones because each manufacturer's fleet skews to a different era. HGST led new installations in 2014, Seagate dominated from 2015 to 2020, Toshiba topped 2023, and WD topped 2024, so raw annualized figures pit aging Seagate and HGST stock against much fresher Toshiba and WD units. A further 146,943 drives, about 31% of the sample, exited the dataset without ever failing, mostly pulled during capacity upgrades.

Toshiba's monthly failure rate more than quadruples once its drives pass 60 months in service, a monolithic jump that no other manufacturer in the dataset shows at any age. Between 50 and 100 months, Toshiba units failed at five to six per 1,000 drives per month, while the other three brands generally stayed at or below 2.5. Seagate's failure rate started highest among young drives but held steady with age. Backblaze's own analysis of its dead drives previously found most failures happened before three years of service.

Each additional one-degree Celsius of average drive temperature raised failure rates by 2.1% in the models, compounding to roughly 23% across a 10 degrees Celsius increase. Each extra terabyte of capacity cut failure rates by about 3.4%, which the authors attribute partly to helium-filled enclosures and newer head-fabrication processes in higher-capacity designs.

The dataset consists of enterprise drives run in Backblaze's data centers, so the ranking may not carry over to consumer models. Backblaze doesn't record comparable workload data across manufacturers, and only 0.52% of sampled drives ran longer than a decade, so the estimates reflect short- to medium-term reliability.

The authors also suggest WD's ownership of HGST plausibly explains why the two brands sit closest together, given the potential for shared technology. Backblaze's most recent annual report, published in February, put its fleet-wide annualized failure rate for 2025 at 1.36%.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The two examples of shattered CDs embedded above might look pretty similar, but the failures may have been precipitated through different vectors. @japanretrogame’s split-down-the-middle CD was perhaps doomed due to too much care and maintenance. Reader notes suggest the user cleaned and polished this CD to keep it clean and shiny. This eventually caused chemical cracking of the polycarbonate substrate, it is thought [machine translations used].

Moving along to consider @CZ662C’s even worse-looking CD fragments, and the tech detectives on X reckon this dramatic damage was caused by storage in a foam-padded case. Some foam padding materials, the story goes, will off-gas ammonia compounds. Apparently sealed protective cases with (particularly polyurethane type) foam padding will off-gas, and if left sealed with CDs inside, the vapor can weaken, craze, or lead to cracking of the polycarbonate structure.

Polycarbonate substrate damage is a greater danger for CD users as compact discs rely on a single layer of this plastic. DVDs employ two polycarbonate halves bonded together with adhesive, which makes them less susceptible to the above-outlined issues.

There’s also bit rot and/or laser rot to worry about

The dangers of bit rot and laser rot have caused far more significant blips on the optical disc user threat radar to date. Wikipedia classifies this kind of damage as being caused largely by oxidation of the reflective layer, reactions with contaminants, and ultraviolet light damage. DVDs can also suffer from de-bonding of the adhesive between the two slivers of polycarbonate in the disc.

Over the years, some brands of optical media have earned a poor reputation for longevity due to bit rot susceptibility. I’ve had numerous discs suffer this kind of damage. It is therefore important to back up optical discs, which may themselves have been backups at some point, to keep all your old digital treasures alive.

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The Seagate BarraCuda comes in a standard 3.5-inch metal chassis and is a CMR drive with a 512MB cache and 7,200 RPM disk spin speed. A SATA 6Gb/s interface delivers up to 190 MB/s transfer speeds, some of the fastest available speeds for this kind of storage, and is the standard for most PC and NAS setups. Its large capacity means you can store reams of data, including pictures and video files.

The massive 24TB capacity of this drive is perfect for someone looking for a large storage drive for a media center or for a big backup drive in a PC. Although the Seagate Barracuda Compute is fast for an HDD, it's not fast enough for modern gaming; you definitely want an SSD for that. But for storing movies, videos, and other media, this drive is perfect.

The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State. It also discovered that OSS utilized Iron Mountain’s services, so it sent a demand letter to the latter to preserve its data and to "pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand." At the time, Iron Mountain did not confirm or deny that it possessed Nine PBS’ data.

At the same time, the channel also sued OSS and its leadership, which it paused after someone who claimed to be a "managing partner of the group that officially acquired" the company reached out. The person, named James Tramel, initially communicated with Nine PBS for about a month. However, this also ended abruptly, with the channel eventually receiving an automated reply from Tramel stating he is no longer connected with OSS. The channel was able to get in touch with him, and he said that he had "been defrauded" into acquiring the cloud storage company and that ownership and operations have now reverted to the previous owners.

This left the channel at a loss, so it continued its case against OSS, and the court ruled that Nine PBS had all the rights to access its data stored with OSS and that the latter should "facilitate its transfer to a new vendor." The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.

The entire thing is a nightmare scenario for Nine PBS, especially as it’s still unclear what will happen to its data. The channel can only assume that its former cloud storage provider is no longer paying data center bills, so it’s rightfully concerned that its data might end up lost forever. And even if Iron Mountain is willing to give Nine PBS its data, it risks getting sued by OSS — it is simply protecting itself by refusing to turn over the said stored data.

It seems that the safest legal way to resolve this issue is for Nine PBS to get a court order requiring Iron Mountain to turn over its data. But the channel must act quickly to ensure that its data, which Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman said to Current represented "70 years of our organization’s history," stays safe.

It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data. And at least there's still a chance — it's not like the fire that the South Korean government experienced last year, which saw 858TB of data go up in smoke.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Phantomdrive is built using the CH569 microcontroller that has a bunch of different hardware blocks — this project uses the USB3, SD/eMMC, and the AES block. There are no NAND chips directly onboard the custom PCB because of the ongoing component crisis. Instead, the Phantomdrive relies on a simple microSD card (that you provide; it doesn't come with one) for both its 8GB decoy partition and the hidden partition. The creator does say they'll make a version with eMMC modules once prices come down.

Of course, if someone were to open up the drive, they'd be able to physically rip the SD card out. However, it still wouldn't be a dead giveaway since many cheap USBs are powered by microSD cards, and SD card adapters are also a thing. Anyhow, the finished drive looks pretty simple from the inside; it comprises a USB port, two buck supplies, a button for firmware update, the microSD card, UART test points, and some support components. The custom firmware now comes into play.

The name of the game is interception. The firmware doesn't know it's being used to handle file transfers; it just reads raw packets of data being sent over the USB bus as is. It's coded to always look for a "password" string, so as soon as you create the unlock.txt file with "password:xyz" inside, it detects the "xyz" bit and copies it over to SRAM, while overwriting the raw data with a bunch of zeroes before it's written to the SD card. The operating system thinks it's created the new file, but the firmware intercepted it midway and sent essentially nothing to the physical storage cells.

The firmware uses the unique internal hardware ID of the microcontroller as the salt, combines it with the password you just typed, and runs the pair through PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA-256 hashes 100,000 times (you can also select 600,000 times) to create a key. Each run induces an intentional 2-3 second delay to deter brute-force attacks that would try to crack the password. The key is used to unlock and lock the hidden partition, and since it's tied to the silicon itself, putting the SD card into another Phantom Drive will not unlock it.

Even if you try to access it directly through a microSD card slot, it will stay hidden, and the 8GB decoy will actually appear like a broken partition. The creator has also provided the option to recompile the firmware on your own to spoof specific vendor IDs, so that the USB appears like it's from different brands. You can make the Phantomdrive pretend to be a cheap 16GB Kingston Datatraveler at the hardware protocol level, at which point no scanning software will flag it as anything more than a cheap USB.

There are Linux-based C tools you can use in case of emergency, however, to recover your data, such as physical damage to the board. The transfer speeds are also very limited because the project is built over USB 2 — 20 MB/s reads and 9 MB/s writes in AES-CTR mode. The speeds fall to 10 MB/s reads and 6 MB/s writes in AES-XTS, but at least you have the freedom to choose between the two according to your needs.

You can buy the Phantomdrive from Rootkit Labs for $50, but you can also build your own, since this is an open-source project. The prebuilt device comes with two extra shells because the pins wear off and break quickly. Otherwise, the GitHub repo provides all the resources, including the PCB layout files and schematics, the BOM for every part, and the custom firmware, alongside its related tools.

The creator of Phantomdrive, Ryan Walker, explains the goal behind the project as both utilitarian and political. It's built using entirely open-source software and with inexpensive, easily accessible components. They wanted to create something that could "slip past authoritarian government representatives, corrupt police, and anyone else that doesn't respect basis encryption rights."

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

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

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

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Specifications

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

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

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

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

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

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M Software and Accessories

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

Sandisk Optimus GX 7100M: A Closer Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Comparison Products

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

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

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

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

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

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

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

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

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

Steam Deck Testing — Gaming, KDiskMark, and Temperature

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

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

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

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

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

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

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

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

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

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

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

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

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

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

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power Consumption and Temperature