If you've got throwing around and piling up on the floor money, Inland's Performance Plus M.2 SSD promises to deliver both cavernous capacity (8TB) and blistering PCIe 4.0 speeds (7000/5800MB/s sequential reads and writes). It also has a bonkers endurance rating of 6000TBW, which means I'd probably die of old age before wearing this thing out. On paper at least, this really is the boot drive of my dreams, and it's on sale at Amazon for 27% off!
(opens in new tab)Unfortunately, that's 27% off of $1,500. At $1,100 I'd love to have one of these in my next build (heck, why not two?). But much like the RTX 4080, it feels somewhat hard to argue for unless your financial cares are nil and you realy crave big boot drive bragging rights. After all, 4TB drives have dropped in price precipitously, and really who has 8TB of data that all has to be on the fastest storage possible?
Let's put it another way. A similarly fast 4TB WD Black SN850X goes for $374 (opens in new tab) right now, or a price of $0.094 per GB. The 2TB drive costs $169 (opens in new tab), or just $0.085 per GB. So this 8TB monster at $0.137 per GB comes at a significant premium. The difficulty is stuffing in enough NAND to hit 8TB in an M.2 form factor.
Are you planning on downloading your entire Steam library and turning off the internet forever? Actually, now that I think about it that might be worth $1,100. If only most games (and my line of work) didn't require an active (or at least occasional) internet connection.
Maybe by the time I sort out all the games I could play on a private internet-free island with my massive and speedy boot drive, the 8TB Inland PCIe Gen 4 SSD will be even more affordable. Now, who wants to sell me a private island (preferably off the northern coast of Scotland) and an RTX 4090 at a reasonable price? I've got big, fast boot drive dreams.
