There are a lot of great Cyber Monday SSD deals going on right now, and one of the best options I've seen is this MSI Spatium M482 2TB 'Eco-Pack' for $89.99. That's only $20 more than a good 1TB SSD. And you're probably thinking, "What's the catch?" The reality is that there really isn't a downside to this MSI drive — unless you really like the extra packaging that inevitably just ends up in the trash.
That's what the "Eco-Pack" name means: You get the SSD, in a plastic clamshell, and not much else. It will likely ship in a small padded envelope. Otherwise, it's the same drive as the MSI Spatium M482, and still with 2TB of capacity. What's more, this is modern hardware, not some throwback to 2021 on clearance. The M482 drive uses Phison's recent E27T controller, paired with Kioxia's 162-layer TLC NAND. We haven't reviewed the MSI drive specifically, but it's the exact same controller and NAND as the Corsair MP600 Elite and Inland TN470.
If you're looking at the MP600 Elite and TN470 reviews and wondering about the 3.5-star rating, that's primarily because both of those drives launched at $140 or more for the 2TB capacity models. Needless to say, knocking $50 off the price to get below $100 will cover a multitude of sins!
Most competing 2TB drives will come with QLC NAND, and while you can get good burst performance with such solutions thanks to pSLC caching, the gains taper off as the drives get filled up. TLC largely avoids any such problems, with direct-to-TLC write speeds of around 1,400 MB/s. If that doesn't sound particularly fast, keep in mind that the best QLC NAND currently gets around 320 MB/s when the cache is full.
Games are becoming increasingly voracious when it comes to storage requirements, and I've seen many new releases tipping the scales at well over 100GB. Some games — looking at you, Call of Duty — can even break the 200GB mark. Setting aside about 200GB for Windows 11, various applications, plus a bit of elbow room means you could fill up a 1TB SSD with just 5–10 games. My current GPU gaming test suite now sits at nearly 3TB, for reference.
So if you're like me and you want a lot of storage, getting 2TB for under $100 is about as good as we've seen in the past couple of years. I'm only sad there's not a 4TB option for under $200.
