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

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

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

Samsung 990 Specifications

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

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

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

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

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

Samsung 990 Software and Accessories

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

Samsung 990: A Closer Look

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Comparison Products

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

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

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

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

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

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

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

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

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

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

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

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

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

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

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

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

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

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

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

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

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

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

Samsung 990 Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A cheaper Aliexpress + DIY alternative for makers?

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

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

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

TeamGroup G70 Pro Specifications

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

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

TeamGroup G70 Pro Software and Accessories

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

TeamGroup G70 Pro: A Closer Look

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

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

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

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

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

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Comparison Products

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

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

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

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

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

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

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

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

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

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

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

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

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

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

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

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

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

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

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

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

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

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

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

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

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

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

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

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

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

TeamGroup G70 Pro Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the memory and storage chip crisis continues to squeeze the market, some PC manufacturers began looking at alternative sources earlier this year just to meet consumer demand. Notebookcheck discovered in its review of the Lenovo ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL that it came with a 512GB YMTC M.2 NVMe PCIe 4.0 SSD. What’s more interesting is that the laptop is readily available in the U.S., and you can order it on Amazon for $1,124.25 at the time of writing -- although as noted above, Lenovo says the U.S. model (21UX000KUS) does not ship with a YMTC SSD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A part of SK hynix that acts independently

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Avi Shetty: We intentionally maintain a diversified customer base.

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

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

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

Floating gate NAND in 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anton Shilov: The 256TB-class drive?

Avi Shetty: Correct. Approximately 245TB usable capacity.

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

Avi Shetty: Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next-generation SSDs: PCIe Gen6 drives with liquid cooling

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

Avi Shetty: Both.

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

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

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

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

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

Anton Shilov: How close are they?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next-generation SSDs: PLC NAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advanced packaging for NAND

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anton Shilov: What did previous generations use?

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

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

Anton Shilov: What about storage-class memory?

Avi Shetty: Like Optane?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks to ongoing AI-driven demand, trying to find any kind of storage, be it SSD or HDD, on sale at a reasonable price is next to impossible, even during deals events like Amazon’s Prime Day. But if you’ve been a PC builder or even a laptop user for several years, there’s a good chance you have a drive of some kind sitting in a drawer or the back of a closet, doing nothing more useful than collecting dust.

Whether it’s a SATA SSD, an NVMe or SATA M.2 drive that you swapped out for a faster or higher-capacity option in the before times, or even an old-school hard drive, you can drop it into an affordable USB enclosure, plug it into one of your ports, and perhaps save yourself hundreds over what you’d have to pay for a new drive at today’s awful storage prices.

Our Best SSD and hard drive enclosures page collects the best enclosures we’ve personally tested. But we’ll include some on-sale options below, as well as enclosures for older drive types, since these hard times for storage might have you reaching back to some truly old drives that can still be useful. Of course, for those who crave fast throughput and have a fast drive to drop in, we’ll also include a 40Gbps option.

A solid, see-through enclosure for 2.5-inch SATA SSDs or hard drives

There are cheaper 2.5-inch SATA SSD / HDD options, but this option from Orico uses a modern USB-C cable, rather than the more common (for some reason) Micro USB-B connection. This is important, both because Micro-B is rare these days, so you might misplace the cable.

But also, should you want to use a USB-C connector on your PC, rather than the USB-A cable that this enclosure ships with, you probably already have a suitable USB-C to USB-C cable. With other enclosures, you'd almost certainly have to order a Micro-B to USB-C cable. And no one wants one of those if they can avoid it.

A sub-$15 10 Gbps NVMe and SATA M.2 enclosure

Unless you're digging some SATA drives out of storage, the most likely (and speediest) option for putting an old drive to use as external storage is an M.2 drive. Older models might be SATA, but newer, faster options use the NVMe protocol. The tool-free option below supports both, as well as all the common physical M.2 form factors.

This enclosure supports speeds up to 10Gbps, which is fine for most mainstream uses. And it's unlikely most have a faster spare PCIe 4 or PCIe 5 drive to take full advantage of faster interfaces anyway. If you do, keep scrolling for a faster option, below.

Breaking out the big guns with a 3.5-inch external hard drive enclosure

If you’ve got a spacious 3.5-inch hard drive you want to make use of and don’t have the space for it inside your PC case, there are, of course, enclosures available for old-school desktop hard drives. And our favorite tested pick, from UGreen, is also on sale.

Despite its svelte size for the category, there's no denying the bulkiness here compared to 2.5-inch enclosures, not to mention the requirement of a power brick. But hey, it supports drives up to 20TB, and you can’t cram all those bits in a 2.5-inch drive.

The only real benefit of 3.5-inch external storage at this point is capacity and price. 2.5-inch hard drives top at 5-6TB, and 8TB SSDs these days usually cost $900 or more. But this enclosure from Ugreen supports up to 20TB drives. Just remember: backing up terabytes of essential data to a single hard drive, without another off-site backup, is a good way to ensure a future catastrophe. Always follow the 3-2-1 backup rule if your data is irreplaceable.

Affordable 40 Gbps external speed, if you need it

If you’re digging in a drawer for an older drive, there’s a fairly good chance it’s not up to delivering 40 Gbps speeds, so there’s no use in overpaying for a pricier enclosure with speeds your drive can’t deliver. But for those who do have a spare SSD that’s capable of speeds of 3,100 MB/s or more and want a fast enclosure, this model from Orico, if you clip the coupon, is one of the cheapest we’ve seen from a known brand.

This is a fanless enclosure, and not as large as some other passively cooled options. So don't expect the fastest possible sustained performance, but Orico's enclosure supports speeds up to 3100 MB/s, as well as USB4, Thunderbolt, and older / slower USB protocols.

Everything in life has an expiry date, and that holds true even for the best SSDs on the market. A fascinating experiment conducted by the YouTube channel WolfyTech shows that SSDs are more durable than we think, even if they were released 16 years ago.

Over the course of the experiment, the channel wrote one petabyte of data to the drive, and the SSD, despite having over 60,000 hours of power-on time, continues to function and shows no signs of catastrophic failure.

The NAND in SSDs gradually degrades over time as you write or erase data, similar to the wear and tear your car or virtually any other electronic device in your house experiences. Just as cars come with a manufacturer’s warranty defined by either years of use or a certain number of miles, whichever comes first, SSDs also come with a warranty defined by either years of use or a metric known as TBW (Terabytes Written).

However, there is a common misconception that when SSD exceeds its TBW rating, it will immediately stop working or become unusable. In reality, the TBW value is simply a guideline that manufacturers establish for warranty coverage. The statistical-based rating is not a definitive indicator of when the drive will fail. Contrary to popular belief, chipmakers don't program NAND to self-destruct when it surpasses the TBW threshold.

To revisit the car analogy, just as a car can run fine beyond 100,000 miles, an SSD can continue to function after exceeding its TBW rating. However, just as older cars may require more frequent maintenance and become less predictable over time, SSDs that surpass their TBW threshold may gradually become less reliable. This is due to the physical wear that accumulates in the drive’s NAND flash memory cells through repeated Program/Erase (P/E) cycles.

Manufacturers engineer SSDs to run beyond the rated TBW by a significant margin, and the Sandisk P4 is a testament to that.

The P4, which launched in 2010 in various formats, including mSATA, primarily targeted OEMs of netbooks, tablets, or ultra-thin notebooks. In its defense, the P4, available in capacities from 4GB to 128GB, used 32nm MLC NAND. Although it's on the archaic side, 32nm 2D MLC NAND is physically larger and can withstand more write cycles than today's 3D TLC or QLC NAND.

Information on the P4 is slim, given that it was released more than a decade and a half ago. Nonetheless, we dug up an old specification sheet showing that the P4 64GB, the model used in WolfyTech's experiment, has a 40 TBW endurance. Therefore, 1 PB or 1,000 TB of written data exceeds the TBW by 25X. The drive also logged over 60,000 power-on hours and over 1,100 power-ups. It would seem that the user created a workload that kept making cached writes to the SSD.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an SSD outlive the manufacturer's specified TBW limit. If you look online, you'll find many SSD endurance tests that challenge the conservative TBW numbers that vendor slap on their products. However, this particular case was pretty interesting, given that it was on an older drive with MLC NAND that has since disappeared from the market.

Even though your SSD will likely have a longer lifespan than its TBW rating, it doesn't mean you should carelessly push your SSD to its breaking point. On the contrary, given the current market situation, you should be taking extra good care of your SSD.

The year is 2026, and a UK man has been sentenced after pleading guilty to the unauthorized mixing and selling of music CDs, and thus breaking copyright laws. Marc Kearns, 47, of East Cowick, near Snaith in East Yorkshire, has been handed a 26-month prison sentence, which will be suspended for 18 months, reports the BBC. He will also have to carry out 250 hours of community service work (unpaid) for his sins.

Perhaps Kearns’ greatest sin was living in the past. The Yorkshireman could have been untouchable, plying his remixes in the cobwebbed corners of the internet. But perhaps his customers were also firmly embedded in the shiny CD-era, with a fondness for hand-made compilations burned on beige desktop PCs. So, direct physical trade was probably the easiest route to profit from his remix CDs featuring music from well-known artists.

Trading standards officers became aware of his trade in illicit CDs way back in 2018. They then began their lengthy investigatory work in 2019, and a warrant was executed in September 2022. The case has only just concluded with Kearns pleading guilty to a number of charges at Hull Crown Court last week.

Commenting on the sentencing, a council spokesperson said of Kearns “This activity enabled him to commercially exploit protected material, generating income at the expense of legitimate artists and businesses within the music industry.” A local councilor also highlighted the potential for generating “significant illicit profit” from the trade in counterfeit and unauthorized goods. They hoped that the sentencing of Kearns, even though it is suspended, would deter other pirate traders.

As we hinted at above, Kearns was probably caught due to his trade involving this old but not totally abandoned physical medium. The way trading standards investigations work, Kearns’s CD remixes business likely left a traceable commercial footprint. However, the sources don’t mention whether he has a market stall, was a car-boot trader, or found customers through mail order, social media groups, or similar.

China-based manufacturers of memory modules and solid-state drives may have an unexpected advantage over their overseas peers. That advantage could be China's government guidance for domestic memory makers to ship more chips to local makers of DRAM modules, SSDs, PCs, and smartphones to support these industries, said Nelson Duann, a senior vice president of Silicon Motion, in an interview with Tom's Hardware.

"China has domestic NAND and DRAM makers, and their strategy is not the same as that of foreign memory suppliers," Duann told us during the interview. "Because they receive government support, they also have a responsibility to help maintain the health of the local market."

Sales of memory modules and solid-state drives have declined drastically in retail in recent quarters due to massively increased prices of DRAM and NAND as the Big Three memory makers prioritize shipments of their chips to AI and data center customers that buy higher volumes and can pay higher prices for premium chips, which is why all memory devices are getting more expensive. As a result, not only memory module and SSD producers have been affected, but also suppliers of smartphones and PCs.

But China-based manufacturers of DRAM and flash memory, such as CXMT and YMTC, may be obliged to support local industries, including producers of DRAM and SSD modules as well as smartphones and PCs, by China's federal or local governments.

"Foreign suppliers generally follow the highest-return opportunities and can allocate most of their supply to data centers," Duann said. "Chinese suppliers cannot do that in the same way because the government can provide guidance and encourage them to support certain local industries."

Indeed, while companies like ChangXin Memory and Yangtze Memory employ thousands of people, the DRAM and SSD module, smartphone, and PC industries employ hundreds of thousands of workers. While domestic AI and data center sectors are important, keeping the electronics industry afloat is even more crucially important for China's federal and local governments, as unemployment can hurt the country more than the lack of an AI model or service.

That said, it is not surprising that Lenovo has already adopted memory made in China in its systems, while other multinational vendors like Acer, Dell, and HP are evaluating such chips. Furthermore, even well-known module brands like Corsair and Patriot Memory have started using Chinese DRAM chips and SSD platforms in a bid to ensure a steady supply.

For more details, check out the whole interview with Nelson Duann on Tom's Hardware.

Silicon Motion is aligning its plans for PCIe 6.0 SSD controllers for client systems with Nvidia's roadmaps rather than those of AMD and Intel, client VP Nelson Duann said in an interview with Tom's Hardware. The company expects its PCIe Gen6 platform for solid-state drives to emerge sometimes in late 2027, though its adoption by high-volume platforms will take some time.

"Our current plan is [to launch client-grade PCIe Gen6 SSD platform] the end of next year," said Duann, senior vice president of client & automotive storage business unit at Silicon Motion, during the interview. "We are not pushing client PCIe Gen6 because of Intel or AMD CPUs. We are pushing it because of Nvidia. Nvidia is moving into the client side as well, and you can sense that from its [Computex] keynote. Nvidia's processors are power-hungry and data-hungry, so our client-side PCIe Gen6 roadmap is driven by Nvidia, not Intel or AMD."

Solid-state drives with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface have been around for about 3.5 years now, so many enthusiasts are eager to move on to SSDs with a PCIe 6.0 x4 interface just because they always want more performance. But while there is one PCIe Gen6 drive model on the market — the Micron 9650 — there are no consumer-oriented platforms that support the latest interface.

In fact, AMD's 6^th Generation Epyc 'Venice' and Nvidia's Vera Rubin will be the only data center CPU platforms to support PCIe 6.0 this year. The broader industry will still be able to take advantage of the next-generation interconnect this year, thanks to switches from companies like Astera Labs, but its adoption will be relatively limited in 2026.

Because PCIe 6.x is challenging and expensive to implement, AMD and Intel are not exactly in a hurry to launch their PCIe Gen6 platforms for client systems, which is why Silicon Motion is trying to align its roadmap with that of Nvidia, which may be more eager to offer a client-grade PCIe 6.0 platform sooner rather than later. With GB10 and future RTX Spark chips, Nvidia is touting bandwidth-hungry AI applications, so using PCIe 6.0 x4 SSDs may make sense for the company.

When it comes to enterprise-grade SSD controllers with a PCIe Gen 6.0 interface, Silicon Motion expects its SM8466 platform with 16 NAND channels to emerge this year, which will be in line with the arrival of AMD's Epyc 'Venice' and Nvidia's Vera Rubin CPUs. In fact, Nvidia's SCADA GPU-accelerated storage system is designed to use PCIe 6.0 storage devices.

"The SM8466 is coming this year, client PCIe Gen6 is planned for next year," Duann said. "We are not rushing to bring client PCIe Gen6 out this year."

For more details, check out the whole interview with Nelson Duann on Tom's Hardware.

What we have today is the WD Black SN8100 by another name, with one very important and exciting change: it’s 8TB. This puts the SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 on an entirely different plane, as it delivers a capacity everyone wants with insanely fast hardware. The 2TB Black SN8100 that we reviewed previously was a pleasant surprise given its high power efficiency, but its absurdly low random read latency remains the real draw. Can all this goodness be repeated at 8TB with a new SKU firmly under the SanDisk name? And will anyone be able to afford it?

The previous 8TB champion, the WD Black SN850X, still remains interesting from a value perspective – if you can call current prices a value in any circumstance – but we’ve had a hard time finding high-end PCIe 5.0 drives at this capacity. The only one we’ve reviewed is the 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro, which, if you missed it when it was on sale, is probably promoting a stinging sensation right now. We’ve been promised an 8TB SKU of the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 – which has the same hardware as the Black SN8100 and Optimus GX Pro 8100 – and 8TB versions of Phison E28 drives, too. So far, these promises haven't materialized. The good news is, if you like the Optimus GX Pro 8100 at 8TB, then you can pick it up in its Black SN8100 form if that happens to be the better bargain.

Whether or not it’s a deal at all is up to you, but it’s hard to beat this level of performance at 8TB. The drive is power-efficient, too, and we have some faith in WD’s and SanDisk’s reliability and willingness to offer support. It’s probably best to buy something you know than roll the dice with unknown hardware, even if the latter comes with some price savings. We think the Optimus GX Pro 8100 qualifies as a better-known option, and given the level of investment at 8TB, that’s the safest way to go, even if there were other options.

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 Specifications

The SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 is available in the same capacities as the WD Black SN8100: 1TB, 2TB, 4TB, and 8TB. At the time of our Black SN8100 review, the 8TB model was not available, but it is now.

The current price disparity is worth a mention. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 is, right now, priced at $349.99, $694.63, $1,339.99, and $2,799.99. This is significantly higher than the Black SN8100’s $259.99, $439.99, $789.99, and $1,799.99. These prices are without heatsinks – check the table for the Optimus GX Pro 8100’s heatsink price per SKU, which only makes sense at 1TB, as is the case with the Black SN8100. You’re better off providing your own heatsink in most cases, and going for the Black SN8100 instead of the Optimus GX Pro 8100 makes sense until the price of the latter comes down to reality. Alternatives in this price range include the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 and the Samsung 9100 Pro, both of which also have 8TB SKUs, although we’ve only reviewed the latter at that capacity.

The drive’s maximum performance is impressive, with bandwidth up to 14,900 / 14,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 2,300K / 2,400K random read and write IOPS. This is about as good as it gets. This level of performance is, on average, attainable with less than 7W of power consumption – a far cry from the 11.5W+ we saw on the earliest high-end PCIe 5.0 SSDs – which makes the drive even more impressive.

SanDisk includes support for TCG Opal 2.02 for encryption. In addition, the drive is backed up to 600TB of writes per TB of capacity within the five-year warranty period. This is standard and comes out to 4,800TB or 4.8PB of writes for the 8TB sample we have today.

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 Software and Accessories

SanDisk features two pieces of software for the Optimus GX Pro 8100: the SanDisk Dashboard, based on WD’s Dashboard, and Acronis True Image for SanDisk. Both applications support other products, and SanDisk also has other software that applies to other products, so check the Software Downloads page if you own a different drive. While the OEM Acronis package has obvious applications – it’s for backing up, cloning, and recovering files – the Dashboard may be more involved for the average user. This SSD toolbox helps you stay on top of your drive’s health, it covers optional features, allows you to update the firmware, and more.

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100: A Closer Look

The 8TB Optimus GX Pro 8100 is a double-sided drive. At all other capacities, it is single-sided. If you’re going for the heatsinked version of the drive, this doesn’t matter, though. In rare cases, you might have a system that needs or prefers a single-sided drive, in which case it’s worth being aware of the fact that you will be limited to 4TB.

As to why the drive is double-sided only at 8TB, that has to do with how many NAND flash packages can fit on the PCB. With the controller and DRAM on the top side, there is only room for two flash packages. Each package can usually have a maximum of sixteen dies. Each die is 1Tb, or 128GB. Therefore, each package contains a maximum of 2TB of flash. Since four packages are necessary for 8TB, the 8TB SKU is necessarily double-sided. There will be exceptions to this on drives that can fit four flash packages per side – DRAM-less drives, and especially ones with only four flash channels, as the controllers may be smaller, or drives with denser flash. 2Tb QLC flash is certainly a possibility, although for the time being, such flash would be prioritized for enterprise.

The only other interesting information here is the power rating. 3.3V / 2.7A puts the power ceiling around 9W, which is more than ample for the average power numbers that SanDisk lists on the specifications sheet. We should point out that those numbers are averages, and for reads and writes separately. In fact, the drive via SMART is rated for active power draw of 8.9W – exactly where 3.3V / 2.7A hits – with a potential peak of 9.5W. Active power could include mixed workloads, that is, both reads and writes, and as that’s what we test, we would expect our maximum value to be closer to that active power number.

The drive has an SSD controller, power management circuitry, two DRAM packages, and four NAND flash packages. The controller is branded SanDisk with the “A101” being telltale, but the “2508” in the middle tells us the truth: this is a Silicon Motion SM2508 and not a proprietary solution. This is a high-end PCIe 5.0 controller with eight flash channels and DRAM support. It’s newer than the original PCIe 5.0 controller, the Phison E26, and is made in a smaller process node. As a result, it is significantly more power-efficient, which is a very good thing considering that some E26 drives came with active cooling. WD and SanDisk do tweak the controller firmware and use nCache 4.0 to separate the drive from more generic designs.

The DRAM is labeled D8CKD, and each package is thus 32 GB or 4GB of DDR4 in a 16-bit configuration. This is 8GB total, which maintains the 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND flash ratio we expect for optimal performance. You could use more efficient DRAM, but the power savings would be relatively small. The flash – labeled in part with 2527 for the 27th week of 2025, exactly matching the controller’s 2527 – is 1Tb BiCS8 TLC. This flash has proven to be power-efficient with exceptionally low random read latency. There’s a reason we find the Black SN8100 hard to beat, and that’s with this combination of characteristics.

MORE: Best SSDs

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Comparison Products

We’ll be comparing the 8TB Optimus GX Pro 8100 to the 2TB WD Black SN8100 – this is effectively the same drive, but at a lower capacity – as well as the 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro, perhaps the best known high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD available at 8TB. The Kingston Fury Renegade, which also uses the same hardware as the Optimus GX Pro 8100 and Black SN8100, is available at 8TB but reviewed at 2TB. It does perform differently from the other two drives, as WD and SanDisk have custom optimization.

We’ve also thrown in the Crucial T710, with the same controller but Micron’s 276-Layer TLC flash instead of BiCS8, and the Phison E26-based Corsair MP700 Pro SE with Micron’s 232-Layer TLC. This latter flash is used with the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller – the same as the Optimus GX Pro 8100 uses – on the Lexar NM1090 Pro and other “budget” high-end PCIe 5.0 drives. Lower-end PCIe 5.0 drives include the Addlink G55 and Crucial P510, included to illustrate the gap between the mid-range and the high end.

This gives a good set of drives for comparison with two areas lacking: PCIe 4.0 drives, which we really don’t think can compare to a monstrous drive like this, and Phison E28-based drives, since we haven’t really seen those on the market and never at 8TB. We’re comparing drives that exist on the market or have been generally available to account for real-world market conditions.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

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

We just spoke about the excellent latency we see with the Optimus GX Pro 8100’s BiCS8 flash, and here we can see the flash in action. The drive is just as fast as the Black SN8100 – unsurprising, as it uses the same hardware, which puts it above every other drive we’ve tested. The drive does appear to be a little bit slower at 8TB when factoring in bandwidth, but this is also unsurprising. Drives with an excess of flash will have more overhead and perform more weakly. However, this is still an incredibly fast drive on par with something like the Corsair MP700 Pro XT, a superfast drive we don’t have on this list because frankly, we haven’t seen the drive available and certainly not at 8TB.

The only thing we can add here is some discussion about using a drive like this for gaming. In fact, SanDisk does advertise the Game Mode, and we think that’s worth mentioning. The SanDisk Dashboard lets you enable, disable, or use auto-detection for Game Mode, a feature that basically puts or keeps the drive in a higher power state for superior readiness. We can loosely estimate what this will mean for load-time improvement, as we can see the enter and exit latencies in SMART. For this drive, from idle to load, these are 1,500µs and 8,500µs or 1.5ms and 8.5ms, if you prefer. Very small amounts of time in the grand scheme of things, and you will see real gains about an order of magnitude better…which is still really small.

As it so happens, SanDisk does show the difference in Final Fantasy XIV. For the 8TB drive, the average improvement is 0.05s, which is on the order of ~1%. This is on an Intel system, for those keeping count. AMD and Intel platforms will perform differently. Naturally, this result is not super impressive, but some systems and games will see larger improvements. We think for desktop use, and if this is your primary drive – a drive you use for everything, especially then Game Mode could be a free tweak. Just don’t set your expectations too high.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

PCMark 10 performance is phenomenal. There is no performance drop evident from going up to 8TB from 2TB, either. This is a very expensive drive – the 8TB Black SN8100 might be the better bet, but it is still expensive – and it’s worth every penny if you care about having the absolute highest levels of performance combined with capacity. This is a much more expensive proposition these days than it was a year or two ago, and, usually, we would recommend putting that money elsewhere in your build. Unfortunately, other hardware components, such as RAM, have also seen massive price increases. We don’t expect SSD prices to come down soon, either, so prepare yourself for a serious investment if this is the way you want to go.

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.

As expected, the Optimus GX Pro 8100 performs well in the PS5. This drive is overkill for the console in every possible way, but it will deliver a good experience if you decide to buy it for this use case. There is some argument to be made for an 8TB PS5 drive – you can’t add multiple internal drives as you can on a desktop PC, and maybe you want extreme capacity, too. This drive running at PCIe 4.0 speeds will also be pretty efficient, which is a nice bonus. Conceivably, you might use the drive in your PS5 temporarily, future-proofing, or making an investment in the drive. Regardless of your potential reasons, we still recommend reserving this drive for a high-end desktop.

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.

With DiskBench, we’re primarily looking at the copy transfer rate to get a good feel for real-world mixed I/O performance. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 matches the Fury Renegade G5 almost exactly, which, considering they use the same hardware, makes sense. WD and SanDisk get more performance out of this hardware thanks to proprietary optimizations; you can see this with the Black SN8100’s superior result, which again makes for a very fast drive. Drives with Phison’s E28 controller, like the aforementioned Corsair MP700 Pro XT, are faster yet, but are just not readily available at this time. We consider the Black SN8100, and therefore the Optimus GX Pro 8100, as being the fastest drives you can regularly buy right now.

We should emphasize that the latter drive is slower than the former in this specific test because we’re comparing a 2TB to 8TB. An 8TB drive can have more overhead with more flash dies. You can see from the specifications table that the 8TB drive pulls more power, for example, and ultimately, performance takes many factors, including power consumption or heat dissipation, into consideration as the controller is always trying to optimize multiple things simultaneously.

Also, write performance is contingent on pSLC caching, which is not precisely the same at different capacities. The cache will be relatively larger at 8TB than 2TB, but with very large caches, as are used with SanDisk’s nCache 4.0, it is likely that the average write speed at 8TB will be somewhat reduced. The controller has to juggle multiple objectives at once, like incoming writes, already-written writes that have to be moved over from the cache, interruptive reads, wear-leveling, etc., which is a job that becomes more complex with 64 flash dies. As a result, slightly lower performance here and in our write saturation test is expected.

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.

Let’s start with ATTO and take a look at reads, as writes are pretty stable with this drive. For reads, we see the MP700 Pro SE, the only drive using the Phison E26 controller here, doing the best below 4KiB. We’ve pointed this out before, as many E26 drives, the MP700 Pro SE included, have twice as much volatile memory (DRAM) as normal. That is, this 4TB drive has 8GB of DRAM. We posited that this might be because the E26 had enterprise origins, and the one case you’d need more memory is if you went with a smaller granularity for mapping or had other, heavier metadata requirements.

To cover the technicals quickly, most drives opt to map 4KiB logical pages with 32-bit (4-byte) addressing, which delivers the 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND flash ratio. This ignores compression and non-mapping metadata, but it is decently representative of the general requirement. If you need to map with smaller granularity, many enterprise workloads demand 2KiB I/O, which is one reason Samsung’s original Z-NAND operates in both 2KiB and 4KiB modes; then you want more memory. This may be one reason the E26 is better here. This is probably only interesting to you if you’re buying a high-end drive and specifically need enhanced performance in this area. Other metadata cases also need memory, but many algorithms, including those for wear-leveling, use block-level granularity, which requires far less memory given large modern block sizes.

The other area of note is 2MiB, where we see many, but not all, of the drives dip. In some cases, this might be because of superpage alignment or nuances of the flash, controller, or flash and controller combination. The NM1090 Pro, for example, doesn’t look too happy there, but the Kingston Fury Renegade G5 has no issue. A look at our logarithmic scale graph shows that the differences between the affected drives are otherwise exaggerated, which matches our real-world findings. Nevertheless, we would recommend a drive with newer flash, like BiCS8, 276-Layer Micron, or Samsung’s 236-Layer, if you want the most consistent performance across larger block sizes. If you’re dealing with media and larger files, that means you.

This translates to CDM, where the QD1 sequential read results for 1MB give some idea of real-world file transfer performance. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 suffers to some extent here, although that might be in part due to its high capacity. Worth noting is that the 8TB 9100 Pro doesn’t suffer in comparison to its 2TB peer, but we’re dealing with a different controller and different flash. Samsung specifically is very good at packaging, which could be one reason. Regardless, the Optimus GX Pro 8100 is able to recover at a higher queue depth, but that only pulls it even with the other top drives. Sequential writes are a different story as the drive handles itself well, and it outperforms the 8TB 9100 Pro at both queue depths. This makes it more interesting for some workloads where you might expect more writes.

Random 4KB latency is also good with random read latency, in particular, being off the chart. Other drives just can’t compare. If you thought the Black SN8100 was a fluke, think again. Drives with the same hardware, like the Fury Renegade G5, also can’t compete with WD’s and SanDisk’s optimization. This level of performance is stellar compared to what we considered the old cut-off for high performance at 45µs. The Optimus GX Pro 8100 is a bit slower than the Black SN8100, but all this really does is underline that these drives are clearly the fastest 8TB drives out there when it comes to what most people care about. For many enthusiasts, this result alone makes the drive the de facto choice.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

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

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

This is an 8TB drive, and an 8TB drive can have a massive pSLC cache. A 3-bit, TLC drive operating in a single-bit mode can have a cache up to one-third its capacity. For an 8TB drive, this is approximately 2.7TB if you’re going by maximum user space, but it can be larger if you’re going by raw flash. The reason we mention this is that it often appears as if WD’s or SanDisk’s nCache 4.0 is a full-drive, dynamic pSLC scheme, but in reality, there is a static portion, and, further, it seems that some amount of flash is left free to improve write consistency. Static pSLC is always available and operates separately from dynamic pSLC, which also improves write consistency. The sizes of each portion can differ with a hybrid scheme, as is the case with Samsung’s TurboWrite 2.0 on the 9100 Pro and other drives.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s look at the drive’s response. It writes at 13.1 GB/s for over 204 seconds with a 2,673GB cache. This is a little bit slower than the Black SN8100’s 13.2 GB/s. Once the cache is exhausted, the drive can write directly to the TLC flash at around 7.64 GB/s. This precisely matches expectations as it’s less than double the speed of the 2TB Black SN8100’s ~3.92 GB/s in this mode. We would expect up to double the speed with double the flash in parallel — the 2TB drive has 16 dies when you can parallelize up to double that amount with four dies per eight flash channels, reached at 4TB and not improved at 8TB. In fact, going up to 8TB can slightly reduce performance.

Finally, the drive runs out of free cache and is forced to wait for data to be moved over from pSLC to native TLC. This “folding” mode slows the drive down considerably. Our steady state write performance for the drive comes in at over 3.1 GB/s, which is less than one-half the TLC speed and, in fact, lower than what the 2TB Black SN8100 achieves. This is because having a large cache means you are fighting a losing battle with sufficiently long writes. You’re trading capacity for temporary speed, but eventually, that has to be paid back. The 8TB 9100 Pro, which also writes a bit slower than its 2TB version at steady state, is way behind the Optimus GX Pro 8100 at just 1.7 GB/s. This is somewhat misleading as the 9100 Pro has very consistent write performance, but it is undeniably slower. Jumping back and forth with write performance as cache is freed is not ideal on top of the added latency to reads during folding. Writing more slowly can improve endurance in part by deferring writes to avoid unnecessary rewrites, so speed is not everything.

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

The Black SN8100 is an extremely efficient drive, so we had high hopes for the Optimus GX Pro 8100, too. Luckily, the drive remains very efficient even at 8TB, beating all but the newest, most efficient drives. It also easily clears the 8TH 9100 Pro, its foremost rival. At over 600 MB/s per watt, this drive can even be run without a heatsink.

In our testing, it reached 75°C, which is 15°C below the initial throttling state. We usually recommend at least 10°C of headroom, with 20°C being ideal. In-between means that you may want to put a heatsink on this drive in hotter systems to be on the safe side. However, that aside, being able to hammer an 8TB high-end PCIe 5.0 drive with writes at a reasonable temperature and being able to copy files efficiently is, frankly, astounding at this level of performance.

The Optimus GX Pro 8100 is simply peerless until we see more 8TB options on the market. We freely admit that we think the 8TB Fury Renegade G5 would give it a run for its money, but, on the whole, the Optimus GX Pro 8100 would probably win. There are no 8TB E28-based drives available, so we feel safe in saying that this is what peak performance looks like at this time.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 Bottom Line

The SanDisk Optimus GX Pro 8100 is simply the finest, fastest 8TB SSD on the market. Yes, it’s the same as the WD Black SN8100, but this is the one we have before us. You can’t go wrong with either drive. We think it would beat the 8TB Kingston Fury Renegade, given WD’s and SanDisk’s special sauce, and we feel it defeats the 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro overall. Your other option is the 8TB WD Black SN850X, which is, of course, only PCIe 4.0. Right now, it’s $300 less, or to put it another way, the Black SN8100 is 20% more. Is it worth the jump up? Honestly, yes, if you want maximum performance, but having the option of the Black SN850X is nice for older systems and the PS5. Many laptops can’t take advantage of PCIe 5.0 drives yet, either. On the other hand, if you’re dropping this much money, then maybe you should go all out and just future-proof.

The Optimus GX Pro 8100 shines almost everywhere it matters. It has class-leading random read latency, which, for many users, is the metric to use for real-world feel. It’s lightning fast even without the optional Game Mode enabled, although that makes the drive even more responsive. The drive is very power-efficient, especially compared to earlier PCIe 5.0 solutions. It has plenty of bandwidth, and SanDisk backs it with all the software you need.

The drive is not perfect, but it performs well enough in all of our tests that we would be hard-pressed to put any drive in front of it except maybe something like the Corsair MP700 Pro XT. Which would be fine if such a drive were purchaseable. 8TB drives based on Phison’s E28 controller are coming, but we simply can’t bet on them being available just yet.

If this drive has a downside, it’s the pricing. Right now, the Black SN8100 is the better deal. For that matter, so is the 9100 Pro. However, if we assume the price goes down to where it should be, we can feel it would be the best drive available. We also should point out that the heatsink premium on this drive, right now, is too large to consider, with a custom solution being the way to go. This might also change in the future, and as the heatsink matches the drive with programmable RGB LED, it should be a good option if the premium is cut. We have no other complaints with the drive and could even, in some cases, recommend it for PCIe 4.0 slots, as, frankly, it has the performance to sustain PCIe 4.0 speeds and would be even more power-efficient. It’s just that the experience will cost you, whether you go for this or the Black SN8100.

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As memory makers prioritize shipments of their products to the AI sector, prices of solid-state drives for consumer applications increased significantly over the last few quarters, which naturally caused retail sales of SSDs to drop significantly in 2026. Nelson Duann, a vice president at Silicon Motion, one of the largest SSD controller makers in the world, said in an interview with Tom's Hardware at Computex 2026 that the retail drive market had almost disappeared in the first half of 2026. Nonetheless, the company still sold plenty of SSD controllers to module makers (the companies that make the finished SSDs), but those devices primarily went to PC OEMs.

"The retail SSD market has almost disappeared," Duann told us during the interview. "The controllers we sell to module makers are now largely ending up in SSDs that are shipped to PC OEMs. The reason is that OEMs cannot obtain enough NAND directly from memory manufacturers, so they are increasingly sourcing SSDs from module makers instead."

According to Duann, PC makers have to buy from SSD module makers because NAND vendors reduced allocation to the client/consumer PC market and redirected most NAND supply to data center products.

As a result, PC OEMs like Acer, Asus, Dell, and HP cannot get enough NAND or SSD supply directly from NAND manufacturers and have to turn to module makers for solid-state drives. The latter traditionally served end-users and had plenty of aftermarket products with enhanced performance and cooling, but now they increasingly serve PC makers instead.

"In the past, most module makers focused on the retail market," Duann said. "Since late last year and into this year, that has changed. OEM demand has become much stronger, and module makers are now supplying a significant portion of their production directly to PC manufacturers. As a result, most of the controllers we sell to module makers ultimately end up in systems built by PC OEMs."

The reallocation of NAND flash supply from the consumer segment to the AI data center segment has caused structural changes in the market in general, hurting some companies badly, but letting others benefit. For independent developers of SSD controllers — such as Phison and Silicon Motion — the situation is generally positive as demand for server-grade drives is increasing, whereas sales of client storage devices are not necessarily decreasing unit-wise. For more details, check out the whole interview with Nelson Duann on Tom's Hardware.

The storage market in general, and the SSD market in particular, has changed structurally in a matter of several quarters due to overwhelming demand for storage devices from the AI sector. As a result of the rapid price increase, demand for solid-state drives and other memory-based PC components dropped in retail in the first quarter. But as paradoxical as it might seem, shipments of SSD controllers increased in Q1 2026 so significantly that both Silicon Motion and its rival Phison posted record Q1 results. This happened not only because these companies increased sales of their data center and enterprise-grade controllers to hyperscalers and server makers, but also because they increased sales of all types of products, both to SSD producers and NAND manufacturers.

At Computex 2026, we sat down with Nelson Duann, Senior VP of Client & Automotive Storage Business at Silicon Motion, to find out how the company's business is going amid the ongoing structural market change and what to expect from SMI on the client storage front in the coming years.

We must say, Nelson Duann is a valuable speaker with an interesting background and a rather unique view on the market and technology development. He has been with SMI since 2007 and has led Silicon Motion's Client & Automotive Storage business since late 2023, when the company was reorganized into two business units and assigned new general managers for each. Duann is responsible for product strategy, OEM engagement, and program execution across these segments. Before assuming his current role, he headed marketing and R&D efforts for mobile storage products and played a significant role in expanding the company's SSD controller and mobile storage businesses into leading positions in their respective markets. Before Silicon Motion, Duann worked at Sun Microsystems on UltraSPARC processor development projects.

Without further ado, let's get to talking.

A rough time the industry, a good time for SMI

Anton Shilov: It has been a rough year for the industry in general, and memory-related segments of the industry in particular, so far. Yet, here we are, your first quarter sales were $342.1 million, up 23% quarter-over-quarter and 105% year-over-years, with sales of SSD controllers up 40% to 45% year-over-year. How did you manage to achieve that? At least on your side of the business.

Nelson Duann: There were two main drivers behind the growth of our business unit in the first quarter.

The first was our Ferri product line, where we sell complete storage solutions rather than just controllers. As NAND prices increased, the prices of those solutions rose as well. We performed particularly well in data center boot drives. On the automotive side, many NAND suppliers have made automotive a low-priority market despite strong demand from carmakers. Ferri is one of the few products that can still ensure supply, so we benefited both from higher NAND ASPs and from having inventory available to serve customers.

The second driver was our controller business. Sales of our high-end controllers, including PCIe Gen4 and PCIe Gen5 SSD controllers as well as UFS 3.1 and UFS 4.1 controllers, were very strong and contributed significantly to revenue growth.

We also started to see some contribution from our enterprise business. Volumes were still relatively small in the first quarter, but enterprise SSD controller programs are beginning to ramp and helped build momentum.

On the client side, demand for high-end controllers increased because NAND suppliers are allocating more NAND to data center products and less to the consumer market. As a result, PC makers have increasingly turned to module makers for SSD supply. While we do not sell SSDs ourselves, most module makers use our controllers, so as their shipments to PC OEMs increased, our controller shipments and revenue increased as well.

Anton Shilov: So memory makers are still supplying PC OEMs directly, but at lower volumes?

Nelson Duann: Yes. They are still supplying them, but allocations to the client market have been reduced significantly. Most NAND is now being directed to the data center segment.

Companies such as Lenovo, HP, Dell, Asus, and Acer cannot always obtain enough NAND from memory manufacturers. As a result, they increasingly turn to module makers for SSD supply. Those module makers build PCIe Gen4 and PCIe Gen5 SSDs, and because most of them use our controllers, that trend benefits our controller business.

Anton Shilov: So, NAND price increases have not really hurt your controller business; you have actually managed to sell more controllers than a year ago.

Nelson Duann: More than a year ago, and more than in the previous quarter, but primarily in the high-end segment. The low-end market has been affected because consumer demand is weaker. NAND has become a valuable resource, so PC makers prefer to allocate available supply to higher-priced products. As a result, demand for high-end SSDs has increased, and those products use controllers with higher ASPs. Growth in the high-end segment has more than compensated for weakness in the low-end market, which is why our controller revenue continues to grow.

Anton Shilov: So NAND shortages have actually helped you.

Nelson Duann: I would not say we are enjoying the shortages, but we have certainly benefited from them.

Anton Shilov: What do you expect to happen in the second half of the year?

Nelson Duann: I think supply will remain very tight. In fact, we met with NAND suppliers this morning, and they told us that the current shortage is only the beginning. They believe 2027 will be even worse.

For the second half of this year, I expect conditions to remain largely unchanged. Supply will stay constrained. You will hear analysts talk about declining PC demand and lower PC shipments, but demand itself has not disappeared. Apple continues to gain share in both PCs and smartphones, which shows that people are still buying devices. The problem is not demand; the problem is supply.

Many PC and smartphone makers cannot obtain enough components to ship the volumes they want. Because NAND and DRAM have become such valuable resources, suppliers are prioritizing higher-end products with higher ASPs and better margins.

I expect this situation to continue through the second half of the year. Looking into next year, NAND makers are quite pessimistic. They believe supply constraints will worsen because cloud service providers and data center operators continue to increase their demand. As a result, NAND suppliers are directing more of their output toward the data center market.

They still want to support consumer devices and automotive applications, but those allocations are relatively small and do not materially change the overall supply picture.

Anton Shilov: So the additional SSD controllers you sold in the first quarter were mostly sold to module makers rather than directly to OEMs.

Nelson Duann: Let me explain that in more detail. The retail SSD market has almost disappeared. The controllers we sell to module makers are now largely ending up in SSDs that are shipped to PC OEMs. The reason is that OEMs cannot obtain enough NAND directly from memory manufacturers, so they are increasingly sourcing SSDs from module makers instead.

In the past, most module makers focused on the retail market. Since late last year and into this year, that has changed. OEM demand has become much stronger, and module makers are now supplying a significant portion of their production directly to PC manufacturers.

As a result, most of the controllers we sell to module makers ultimately end up in systems built by PC OEMs.

Anton Shilov: One advantage Silicon Motion has is that you work with all six NAND manufacturers and also supply controllers to some of them. Given the current shortages, have shipments of controllers to NAND makers declined?

Nelson Duann: Unit shipments to NAND makers have declined. However, those companies are increasingly focused on higher-end products, so the mix has shifted toward premium controllers with higher ASPs. As a result, while controller volumes are lower, the higher ASPs have largely offset the decline in unit shipments. Consequently, our controller revenue has continued to grow.

Anton Shilov: One quick question. When you ship controllers to NAND makers, are they standard Silicon Motion products, or are they customized for specific SSDs?

Nelson Duann: NAND makers are no longer very active in the retail SSD market because NAND supply is limited. Most of the SSDs they build today are shipped to PC OEMs, and many of those drives use our controllers.

The controller hardware itself is generally not customized. What changes from customer to customer is the firmware. Every PC maker has different requirements, so NAND suppliers or SSD makers may ask us for firmware modifications tailored to a particular OEM. The controller ASIC remains the same; the customization is primarily done at the firmware level.

Anton Shilov: So the differentiation happens mostly through firmware tuning rather than hardware changes?

Nelson Duann: Correct.

Mobile Storage

Anton Shilov: Since you mentioned that the retail market has weakened considerably, can you provide a breakdown of your SSD, UFS, and eMMC controller business?

Nelson Duann: We group UFS and eMMC together and treat SSD controllers as a separate category. In the first quarter, the split was almost even. UFS and eMMC combined accounted for roughly 52%, while SSD controllers represented about 48%.

The reason is simple: smartphone volumes are still higher than notebook volumes. On a unit basis, mobile storage controllers ship in larger quantities than SSD controllers. We expect a similar mix going forward.

Anton Shilov: What is the split between UFS and eMMC today?

Nelson Duann: That is a good question. If we look at revenue, UFS generates more revenue than eMMC. However, in terms of unit shipments, eMMC volumes are still higher. The reason is simple: eMMC carries a much lower ASP. So while UFS contributes more revenue, eMMC still ships in larger quantities.

Anton Shilov: So eMMC still refuses to disappear.

Nelson Duann: Yes, that is true.

Anton Shilov: I assume that is because eMMC is used not only in smartphones, but also in a wide range of other devices.

Nelson Duann: Exactly. It’s widely used in IoT devices, automotive applications, and many other embedded products. That’s why eMMC will remain around for a long time. It has a very long tail.

Anton Shilov: Since your sales have been growing, can you comment on your market share in client SSD controllers?

Nelson Duann: In client SSD controllers, our worldwide market share is approaching 30% to 32%. For mobile storage, combining UFS and eMMC controllers, we estimate our share of the Android smartphone market at around 25% to 26%.

Anton Shilov: That is a significant share.

Allocation priorities

Nelson Duann: It is. And we expect it to grow further. NAND suppliers are allocating less memory to PCs and smartphones, which forces device makers to seek alternative sources of supply. Many turn to module makers, and we have a very strong position in that ecosystem.

As long as module makers continue to gain business, demand for our controllers should benefit as well, even though we do not manufacture SSDs or storage devices ourselves.

Anton Shilov: So the smartphone market is behaving somewhat like the PC market: device makers cannot get enough supply directly from NAND vendors and therefore have to turn to module makers?

Nelson Duann: Let me explain the allocation priorities in more detail. For NAND suppliers, the first priority is clearly the data center. The second priority is smartphones, because NAND is often supplied together with Low Power DRAM. The third priority is PCs, and the fourth is automotive.

Because of that priority order, smartphones are in a better supply position than PCs. However, supply is still not sufficient because the majority of NAND output is going to data centers. The data center segment may receive 70% to 80% of total allocation, leaving only 20% to 30% for smartphones, PCs, automotive, and everything else. As a result, even smartphone shipments could decline this year because of NAND and memory supply constraints, perhaps by 15% to 20% compared with last year.

Anton Shilov: Especially at the low end.

Nelson Duann: Yes. The low-end [smartphone] segment is largely gone, while the high-end segment continues to grow. PCs will probably decline more sharply in unit terms than smartphones because PCs face a more severe supply shortage.

There is one uncertainty, however: China is a different market. China has domestic NAND and DRAM makers, and their strategy is not the same as that of foreign memory suppliers. Because they receive government support, they also have a responsibility to help maintain the health of the local market.

Foreign suppliers generally follow the highest-return opportunities and can allocate most of their supply to data centers. Chinese suppliers cannot do that in the same way because the government can provide guidance and encourage them to support certain local industries.

Anton Shilov: So PC makers in China can get more stable NAND supply?

Nelson Duann: Yes, and DRAM as well. Most Android smartphone makers are now in China, and China is also home to Lenovo, one of the world's largest PC makers. Lenovo still has supply issues, but compared with HP, Dell, Asus, and Acer, its situation is less severe because it has support from local memory suppliers.

Anton Shilov: Is there any chance NAND supply will increase meaningfully in 2027 and help ease the shortage?

Nelson Duann: Bit supply will increase, but not enough to match demand. Demand could increase by around 100%, while bit growth will not come close to that level.

DRAM and NAND output will increase somewhat because of technology migrations rather than major increases in fab output. New fabs are being built, but they will not begin meaningful production until late next year or early 2028.

Suppliers can get some bit growth by moving to newer NAND generations, but demand is growing faster. As a result, the shortage will not improve next year. It will get worse.

Anton Shilov: Given high memory prices, undersupply, and limited ways to bring supply and demand into balance, what is the best strategy for a non-memory company like Silicon Motion on the client side? Do you adopt new 3D NAND types as quickly as possible, or slow client investments and focus more on data centers?

Nelson Duann: We have several strategies. First, we have to follow NAND vendors very closely and make sure our controllers support each new NAND generation quickly. Once NAND suppliers move to a new generation, they cut older generations quickly, so our controllers must be ready as soon as new NAND reaches the market.

Second, we need to encourage customers to move toward higher-end products. That is where the revenue and margins are, both for us and for our customers.

Third, as NAND becomes more expensive, customers may reduce capacity per device to manage cost. For example, a product that used to ship with 128GB may move to 64GB. But each device still needs a controller, so lower capacity per unit can increase controller demand.

Fourth, we need to continue advancing our technology. Nvidia's recent AI PC direction shows that the PC paradigm is changing. These systems need much more efficient data movement to feed their processors.

From my point of view, the market is moving beyond the traditional PC toward what we call a Personal Agentic AI machine. A system with 128GB of DRAM is not a conventional PC anymore. Today's PCs typically have 16GB or 32GB of DRAM.

To support this shift, storage architecture and performance need to improve significantly. That is why we introduced our new PCIe Gen5 DRAM-less controller with much higher random I/O performance. For AI workloads, when DRAM is not enough for KV cache, data needs to spill over to storage, which makes random I/O extremely important.

We are already re-engineering our architecture for this shift. Personal Agentic AI systems are expensive today, but costs should come down over time as the whole ecosystem redesigns storage and data-transfer architectures.

New NAND types support

Anton Shilov: Do you also expand the list of NAND types supported by existing controllers to address supply constraints?

Nelson Duann: Yes. We are known for supporting all major NAND types available on the market, including MLC, TLC, and QLC, and we will continue to expand support.

You never know which NAND type or supplier will have better availability. The more NAND types our controllers support, the more flexibility our customers have when dealing with supply shortages. We will continue to invest. In addition to supporting upcoming NAND generations, we are also looking at PCIe Gen6. PCIe Gen5 is the mainstream today, but the data center and enterprise markets are already moving toward Gen6.

Anton Shilov: The only platforms with PCIe Gen6 support right now are AMD's EPYC 'Venice' and Nvidia's Vera CPUs. Intel's Xeon does not support PCIe Gen6 yet.

Nelson Duann: Not yet. But in the data center, do not forget Nvidia. Nvidia is also pushing very hard for PCIe Gen6 because its [GPUs] are data-hungry monsters. PCIe Gen6 storage is not being driven only by AMD. Nvidia is also pushing the storage ecosystem to move to Gen6.

On the PC side, Gen6 is not here yet. PCs are still on Gen5, but we are preparing now. Controller development takes years, so we cannot wait until Gen6 CPUs arrive. That would be too late. We always start preparing several years in advance for new technologies and new interface chips.

Arm is a default choice for now, but RISC-V is being considered

Anton Shilov: With the SM2524XT, you support a 4.8 GT/s NAND interface.

Nelson Duann: Yes, on the NAND side. More NAND makers are moving to 4.8 GT/s interfaces, so that is important. Faster NAND also enables more efficient AI-oriented storage architectures, including KV-cache offload. Those workloads rely on faster interfaces and more efficient data transfer. That is what we are preparing for in the second half of this year and next year.

Anton Shilov: The SM2524XT has four CPU cores. Why did you move from three cores to four?

Nelson Duann: The previous SM2504XT had three cores. We moved to four cores to improve random I/O performance. Random I/O benefits from several things. First, a faster NAND interface. Second, SCA technology. Third, more controller compute power. With random I/O, addressing is random, so the controller must quickly translate logical addresses to physical NAND locations. That requires fast computation. The additional CPU core helps improve random I/O performance, which is important for KV-cache offload.

Anton Shilov: Do you continue to use Arm Cortex-R cores?

Nelson Duann: Arm remains a good partner, and as long as Arm continues to support us, we will continue using Arm cores. At the same time, we are internally studying RISC-V.

For storage applications, Arm and RISC-V can both provide enough performance. The bigger issue is the toolchain. If we move from Arm to RISC-V, our R&D team needs to change toolchains. Some customers buy our controllers but develop their own firmware, and they would also have to change toolchains.

So we are evaluating RISC-V carefully. Arm remains more widely used, and the ecosystem is mature. We have not formally adopted RISC-V in client products yet, but we are doing intensive internal evaluation.

Anton Shilov: What kind of performance improvement does the SM2524XT deliver in typical client workloads?

Nelson Duann: It depends on the benchmark, but in general, we are targeting roughly a 25% increase in random performance compared with the previous generation. Sequential performance also improves by about 25%. Faster NAND is part of the reason, and the additional core also helps. But just as importantly, performance per watt has improved. It is easy to increase performance by consuming more power. The hard part is improving performance while staying within the power limits of a client PCIe drive.

Our new generation delivers more performance per watt, perhaps around 10% to 15% better than the previous generation. That is important because we need to increase performance while keeping the entire client SSD within its PCIe power envelope.

Future SSD controllers

Anton Shilov: Is SCA coming to high-end eight-channel client SSD controllers?

Nelson Duann: For PCIe Gen5, no. Our first-generation Gen5 client controller was an eight-channel DRAM-based design. But our second- and third-generation Gen5 client controllers are four-channel DRAM-less designs. Since the NAND interface is faster, we no longer need eight channels to achieve the same or better performance.

For PCIe Gen6, however, we are considering going back to eight channels on the client side. For enterprise Gen6, the plan is 16 channels.

Anton Shilov: Future SSD controllers will have to support NAND with many more layers, which means stronger ECC will be required.

Nelson Duann: Correct. LDPC technology must advance generation by generation. We have a dedicated team working on error-correction capability because it is a fundamental part of NAND flash controller design.

As NAND moves to newer technologies and higher layer counts, we need stronger ECC to maintain reliability and data integrity.

Anton Shilov: Enterprise controllers have already moved to 16KB LDPC codewords. What about client controllers?

Nelson Duann: We are considering 16KB LDPC for our next-generation client chip, probably for PCIe Gen6, but we have not made a final decision yet. We are evaluating both the advantages and the disadvantages.

The advantage is that 16KB LDPC can correct more errors, which helps support future NAND. The downside is cost, die area, and compute requirements. Another issue is that most PC hosts still issue 4KB read and write commands, while 16KB LDPC is better aligned with larger data units. That mismatch can create read-modify-write operations, increase latency, and affect QoS. Enterprise hosts have moved much more toward 16KB commands, but client PCs remain mostly 4KB. So we need to evaluate the impact on performance, latency, and QoS before making a decision.

Anton Shilov: I assume different product lines also require different LDPC designs.

Nelson Duann: Exactly. Different product lines use different LDPC designs. For mobile devices, low power is extremely important, so LDPC is tuned for power efficiency rather than maximum performance. For PCs, there is a little more power budget, so we can tune LDPC more toward performance. Enterprise SSDs have even more power headroom, so performance becomes the top priority.

It is not one LDPC design for every product. We tune LDPC differently depending on the requirements of each market.

Anton Shilov: When do you expect to offer client PCIe Gen6 controllers?

Nelson Duann: Our current plan is for the end of next year. We are not pushing client Gen6 because of Intel or AMD CPUs. We are pushing it because of Nvidia. Nvidia is moving into the client side as well, and you can sense that from its keynote. Nvidia’s processors are power-hungry and data-hungry, so our client-side PCIe Gen6 roadmap is driven by Nvidia, not Intel or AMD.

Anton Shilov: Enterprise PCIe Gen6 controllers are coming out this year, correct?

Nelson Duann: Yes, the SM8466 is coming this year. Client Gen6 is planned for next year. We are not rushing to bring client Gen6 out this year.

Anton Shilov: The client Gen6 controller is called Neptune, right?

Nelson Duann: Yes, that is our codename.

PLC NAND may not be a viable option as QLC to reach 4Tb per device

Anton Shilov: Any thoughts on PLC NAND?

Nelson Duann: So far, there is no sign of activity around PLC. NAND makers are benefiting from the current market situation, so they are not eager to move to PLC.

QLC has already reached 2Tb per die, and we hear some companies are working on 4Tb dies without moving to PLC. If you move to PLC, the capacity of a single die becomes very large and more difficult to use.

PLC could reduce cost from the memory vendor's point of view, but cost reduction is not their main concern right now. In my personal opinion, memory vendors have learned from past cycles. Previously, when shortages occurred, they rushed to increase output, which later created oversupply and hurt everyone. This time, they are much more disciplined. If NAND makers wanted to move to PLC, they would need to tell us years in advance because we would have to build controllers that can reliably read that NAND. Right now, we see no sign of such a transition.

Anton Shilov: So, for ultra-high-capacity SSDs, the industry may focus more on advanced NAND packaging than PLC.

Nelson Duann: Exactly.

AGI is probably not a brand you’ve heard of, but they make many memory products that are often sold at a discount. We reviewed the AI818 SSD two years ago with something less than enthusiasm, but we’re happy to say that AGI seems to have taken our critique to heart with the AI858. A budget, high-end drive is a bit of a contradiction, but in this atmosphere of skyrocketing memory prices, every dollar matters. If you can save a few bucks and still get a fast drive, you should, and that’s the segment the AI858 is targeting, but this time with hardware that’s actually good.

AGI AI858 Specifications

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

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

AGI AI858 Software and Accessories

AGI offers no downloads aside from the spec sheet. For checking drive health information, we recommend CrystalDiskInfo. CrystalDiskMark, its sibling, is good for benchmarking your drive to make sure everything is working well. For backups and disk imaging/cloning, we recommend MultiDrive for Windows and either Clonezilla or Rescuezilla for other operating systems or for booting.

AGI AI858: A Closer Look

This is a double-sided drive with a heatsink. Great for desktops and, in a pinch, the PS5, but less great for anything else. Considering it’s a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive, that’s fine – you’ll be using this in an enthusiast desktop, most likely.

There’s not too much else interesting here unless you read the PCB silkscreen lettering beneath the rear label. This gives you information after the drive and its components – it’s using the Silicon Motion SM2508 (SM2508) controller in the M.2 (M2) form factor with LPDDR4 (LPD4) volatile memory, four NAND flash packages (4) in the BGA178 (178) form factor with an SMI reference design (Y260A), manufactured during week 23 of 2025 (25.23). This information could be useful to you in multiple scenarios: when you’re looking at review photos of drives, when you are checking a drive you purchased, or when you’re comparing drives.

The drive has the SMI SM2508 controller, as mentioned, with a single Samsung LPDDR4 DRAM memory module and four mysteriously-labeled NAND flash modules. The Samsung memory is low-power, which is good, and is in a 16Gb or 2GB configuration, which means the drive meets the usual 1GB:1TB DRAM:NAND ratio.

Deciphering the flash is a little trickier, but we’ve discovered that this uses Micron’s 232-Layer TLC. This matches other “budget” SM2508-based drives that are using this flash rather than BiCS8 or 276-Layer Micron. It’s not a bad trade-off if you can get the drive for a little less money.

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Comparison Products

The AGI AI858 gets no respite as it’s up against some of the fastest drives on the market. These include the proprietary WD Black SN8100 and Samsung 9100 Pro. We then have drives with the SM2508 controller, including the Kingston Fury Renegade G5, using BiCS8, and the Lexar NM1090 Pro and Biwin Black Opal X570 using Micron flash. The Crucial T705 and Corsair MP700 Pro SE are using that same Micron flash but with the Phison E26 controller, instead. Lastly, we have the lower-end Addlink G55, which uses BiCS8.

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 AI858 falls into the middle of the pack in 3DMark, which, all things considered, isn’t that bad. The drives with BiCS8 flash – the Black SN8100 and Fury Renegade G5 – are the fastest drives due to the flash’s famously low latency. The DRAM-less G55 and X570 are at the opposite end and are the slowest. Everything else is within the same zone, and the AI858 actually beats its closest rival, the NM1090 Pro, by a small amount. We could chalk this up to the capacity difference, after all, 4TB could be slower, but our experience with similar drives like the Acer Predator GM9000 suggests otherwise. The AI858 is legitimately slightly faster here.

Games are starting to lean on SSD performance more, but a small loading advantage was more compelling back when drives were affordable. That said, if the AI858 or equivalent is within a reasonable distance from other drives, it could be worth jumping up to the faster platform. The gaming advantage would just be icing, and this gap could widen in the future. Normally, that’s not a big deal for a current-day purchase, but if we’re years out before a consumer SSD industry recovery, then buying speed early is a fine investment.

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.

We see a similar difference in PCMark 10. The AI858 again beats the NM1090 Pro and, as before, this isn’t due to the capacity difference, given our overall review experience. The drive ends up in the middle again, but this isn’t a bad place to be when facing off against some of the fastest drives on the planet. You’ll get better responsiveness out of the Black SN8100, but the AI858’s level of performance is still exceptional.

As with gaming, it’s hard to justify price leaps when app and app loading performance differences might be relatively small in the real world. However, the extra bandwidth can be more impactful for enthusiasts. We do think it’s worth going with an AI858-class drive over a DRAM-less PCIe 4.0 if you’re building a powerful system with a purpose; it’s just a matter of pricing that advantage against the other hardware components. It’s safe to say that personal computing as a whole has gotten much more expensive, and SSD price scales almost directly with capacity. This means nailing down the right performance range – which could be as simple as, which 1TB drive gives me the best bang for the buck if I’m a developer? – becomes more crucial.

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.

AGI takes care to mention PS5 performance – 6 GB/s sequential reads – for this drive as it is a viable use case. We see no performance issues whatsoever, but putting a high-end PCIe 5.0 SSD into your PS5 is a somewhat questionable decision. You can almost always get away with a less expensive drive that will perform equivalently.

We actually think it’s more valuable to find a reliable drive for this. Having a heatsink, as the AI858 does, is actually an investment towards this goal, as you want to stop your PS5 drive from throttling. Two things to address here. First, yes, NAND flash likes heat, but if your drive is redlining in the PS5 from the ambient under load, then that is very much a problem. Two, the AI858 is a high-end drive, but it’s built with a newer, more efficient controller and will be running at half speed in a PS5. Therefore, it’s likely to do very well even without its heatsink, which makes it an interesting pick if you can find it priced reasonably.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

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

We’re admittedly a little disappointed in the AI858’s DiskBench scores – 2,231 MB/s for the copy transfer rate is particularly low – but we feel this is a good opportunity for analysis. The drive’s read transfer rate is perfectly normal and even good by some measures, beating drives like the Fury Renegade G5 and 9100 Pro. Then we have the write transfer speed, which is below 2 GB/s and 10% or more beneath its peers. Clearly, the copy transfer rate is hindered by this more than anything else.

This does mean that the drive may take writes more slowly than the competition and will write more slowly to itself. This can lead to a slowdown in some cases, and especially if you have multiple fast drives with lots of transfers, this performance deficit can add up. However, in daily use, it doesn’t mean much, and on the flip side, if you are doing extreme writes, then it could even out over the long term. This is one reason we test write saturation – see our results below.

However, looking specifically at this result, it’s within the margin of error versus the identically-equipped NM1090 Pro and even the Black Opal X570. This is logical as the other drives on the list, except for the T705 and MP700 Pro SE, are using newer flash. In fact, the T705 is using the same flash as the AI858. Our test fits within the pSLC cache, and we would not expect the Phison E26 controller to outdo the SM2508, so we believe this is due to a difference in flash optimization. We know there were some issues getting Micron’s 232-Layer flash up to speed, especially at capacity, and Crucial having a better handle on it is not surprising.

We’re hesitant to call it a flash quality difference; maybe more of a trade-off, as being conservative with write performance, with read workloads being prevalent in consumer usage, can be a smart move. The T705 was trying to stand apart at its launch so we can understand why it pushed the limits at the time. This also partly explains why the AI858’s results are less impressive today. Alternatively, or in combination, it’s also possible AGI is doing this to reduce user flash wear in order to make the TBW in the case they have to swap hardware, or if they have to use lower PEC flash. This is not an issue for the general user, but could be worth consideration if you are buying a drive to do a lot of writes.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

ATTO gives us a good idea of how a drive will operate with transfers of files of various sizes. A queue depth of 1, or QD1, is not unreasonable for this. While usually you look at random read performance to derive a real-world feel, for many games and apps, sequential reads are actually more common. Likewise, 4KiB tends to be what people focus on, while many games and apps operate with bigger I/O. We get to see the full picture with ATTO, including writes, which are more impactful if you intend to use the drive for caching.

The most noticeable thing we see with the AI858 is the drop at 2MiB for sequential reads. This is mirrored with many other drives, including the T705, the Lexar NM1090 Pro, and the MP700 Pro SE, drives that have the same flash. Why the drop here? As two different controllers are used here, we can assume the flash is the culprit. Micron’s 232-Layer TLC uses six planes and the typical 16KiB page size. Multiplying these by the controller’s eight flash channels and, with parallelization, by two or four dies per channel, you get 1.5MiB and 3MiB-sized superpages, respectively. Without outstanding I/O at QD1, this could be the cause, but this remains speculative. The two controllers – The E26 and SM2508 – handle it differently, with the E26 less impacted, so this might be more of a firmware-flash combination.

Chances are you’re not buying a drive for such specific performance, but it’s worth noting if you’re technically-minded. We can also see ATTO map to CDM with the latter’s sequential results, specifically QD1 reads, which tell us a lot. The AI858 and NM1090 Pro, for that matter, do poorly here against the other drives. This is down to the controller. Lots of reads happen at QD1, and 1MB is a realistic I/O size. On the other hand, if you’re doing writes, you’re fine and dandy. If you’re doing reads and writes or reads at a higher queue depth, the AI858 is also right up there. Random write latency is also excellent, so this could make an excellent “budget” caching drive if you need something PCIe 5.0.

Let’s be honest, though, you’re here to look at random 4KB QD1 latency. We’re pleased to say that the AI858 does exceptionally well, beating all drives that don’t have BiCS8 flash. It’s a stellar choice on a budget for this reason, or at least as much “budget” as you can get on a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive. If that’s your primary metric, then you can leave the review knowing AGI hit the mark on this one.

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 drive first writes in the fastest pSLC cache mode at almost 12.6 GB/s for over 32 seconds. The cache is over 400GB in size, roughly 406GB by our numbers, which is large in comparison to some drives like the T705 but is not as large as the cache on the Fury Renegade G5 or NM1090 Pro. A 2TB TLC flash drive can have a cache up to almost 700GB – the Fury Renegade G5’s is almost 684GB in our testing – but this leaves little spare space to handle longer writes. The AI858 gracefully declines to ~3.7 GB/s in a presumably direct-to-TLC mode, which is close to what we see with the T705 and Black Opal X570, drives with the same flash. This is a solid result.

The drive eventually runs out of free space and must wait for already-written data in the background to “fold” from the cache into native flash. This reduces the drive's write speed and increases latency. In this case, the drive manages around 1.25 GB/s, which isn’t super fast but isn’t the end of the world for that weakest performance state. In fact, the drive averages 3.677 GB/s for steady state, which is quite good. We typically expect this level of performance for this flash, although it can be faster in drives like the T705, which again does have a smaller pSLC cache.

Given the NM1090 Pro’s results, we suspect AGI targeted write performance at a certain level – matching what we saw earlier in DiskBench – and the cache was adjusted to reflect this. We think this was a good move, even if it doesn’t always benchmark as well. You’re bound to have a more consistent experience as a result, and the drive is capable of heavier workloads, which makes the drive usable in a caching scenario. However, we would caution against greatly exceeding the TBW within the warranty period on a drive like this. This means knowing your workload’s average write amplification factor, as host write counting won’t cut it – some of the Micron 232-Layer TLC floating out there may be rated significantly below the normal 3,000 PEC.

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

Is the AI858 efficient? For a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive, yes! It puts the original E26 generation of drives – including the T705 and MP700 Pro SE – to shame. On the other hand, it’s no match for the high-end BiCS8-equipped drives or the more modest G55. The real question is: does this matter? We think that, with a heatsink, this drive will stay cool and should end up in a system where its power draw is fine. It will not require active cooling.

Our temperature testing reinforces this assumption with a maximum rating of 66°C on the primary sensor. This is 17°C below the first throttling point. We could see this drive working without a heatsink in some machines if they are cooled well enough, and certainly in laptops that are using a PCIe 4.0 slot, where it will pull less power. We see no issues here worth mentioning.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

AGI AI858 Bottom Line

AGI’s AI858 does everything it needs to do and nothing it doesn’t. It has a high bandwidth ceiling with good to excellent random read latency. Sustained write performance is also good, and the drive doesn’t overheat or pull too much power. It even comes with a heatsink to make life easier. While it’s no record-setter, it performs well enough on the whole to firmly be a high-end PCIe 5.0 drive. It’s positioned to be less expensive than the more well-known alternatives like the Black SN8100 while providing most of the performance. We have no trouble recommending it if you’re looking for a drive in this class, which is certainly an improvement over the last AGI drive we reviewed.

The downsides are exactly what you would expect here. As we stated, its performance is good but not the best. Its power efficiency is good but not the best. Its sustained write performance and even its excellent random read latency…you guessed it, not the best. It doesn’t have a flashy 8TB SKU to throw at you, either. That’s fine – the AI858 is not trying to be that drive. It’s a budget alternative to high-end options with relatively small trade-offs. If you have a PCIe 5.0 system and don’t want to let that bandwidth go to waste, it’s more than sufficient. Enthusiasts at that level usually know how to manage a drive so the lack of software support isn’t a big issue. There are several drives like the AI858 so, at the end of the day and as always, it comes down to price. Scout accordingly.

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Last week at Computex 2026, Wiwynn showed off one of the industry's first Nvidia SCADA (SCaled Accelerated Data Access) servers. Devices such as this are built to handle the extreme data demands of AI data center-focused inference and training workloads, which operate with massive models and datasets, therefore requiring large, fast, and connected devices to serve as the backbone for complex, high-throughput tasks that AI workloads depend upon.

Wiwynn's SCADA server packs up to 96 liquid-cooled solid-state drives and therefore offers petabytes of storage space using currently available E3.S drives, and massive I/O performance. The machine is based on Nvidia's Vera CPU, four RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell graphics cards, four PCIe 6.x switches, and four ConnectX-9 SuperNIC cards.

Storage architecture for AI

Modern AI inference and training workloads often deal with massive datasets that exceed the memory capacity of an AI accelerator's onboard memory, which is why AI applications need to access rapid storage.

While AI training is typically dominated by large sequential transfers, AI inference workloads such as vector search, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), graph analytics, and KV-cache retrieval often rely on fine-grained random accesses (that frequently involve data blocks smaller than 4KB) with extreme parallelism, as the system deals with thousands of GPU threads.

Traditional CPU-centric I/O cannot efficiently handle such workloads and creates bottlenecks because the CPU must issue commands, manage requests, and control data transfers. Even in advanced solutions like GPUDirect Storage, which allows data to be transferred directly from SSDs to GPUs, the CPU still owns the control path and can become a bottleneck.

The SCADA platform, previewed in late 2025, is designed to allow GPUs access to very large datasets directly and efficiently without involving a central processor. This is impossible to do on conventional machines, as SCADA lets GPUs themselves initiate and control storage I/O operations and the data path.

SCADA runs on PCIe 6.x hardware from partners like Broadcom and Micron, and customers can now build their own SCADA machines with commercially available components. However, SCADA servers have not yet been popularized. In fact, Wiwynn seems to be among the first server makers to even showcase a SCADA server.

Wiwynn's SCADA server

Wiwynn's SCADA server can indeed be a panacea for the problem that is AI storage. It supports up to 96 liquid-cooled E3.S SSDs, meaning that the drives will perform as expected even under high loads. When equipped with 96 30.72 TB Micron 9650 Pro drives with a PCIe 6.0 interface, the server can store 2.949 PB of data.

On the performance side of things, Wiwynn claims an aggregated random read speed of 528 million 4K IOPS, as well as sequential read/write speeds limited by the performance of PCIe switches and/or network cards rather than the drives themselves. As manufacturers expand the capacities and performance of their E3.S SSDs, servers like the one Wiwynn demonstrated at Computex will gain capacity and performance as well.

Architecturally, Wiwynn's SCADA server is an Nvidia MGX rack-compliant system in an 6RU form-actor that has a maximum power consumption of 9 kW. All key components of the machine are liquid cooled, the drives are cooled by six separate cold plate modules that are integrated into the system's liquid cooling loop so to inject coolant to all SSDs simultaneously in order to ensure consistent performance of all drives.

Positioning

Nvidia clearly positions SCADA as tier 3.5 storage servers located behind local SSDs, but ahead of tier 4 remote storage servers that often rely on hard drives.

SCADA machines are meant to feed data to actual compute servers at a very high data transfer rate in small blocks, so its RTX 6000 Pro GPUs act more like very sophisticated storage processors that initiate and handle storage transactions, millions of small storage requests on behalf of AI applications, and pass them to the compute server via the ConnectX-9 cards, while the SSDs and their controllers still perform the actual storage functions.

In general, SCADA is a part of Nvidia's Storage Next vision, which is a collection of technologies aimed to make storage behave more like an extension of GPU memory for AI workloads.

For obvious reasons, Wiwynn does not disclose pricing of its SCADA storage server as it depends on multiple factors, including pricing of 3D NAND, DRAM, and SSDs, not to mention purchase volumes. In any case, an Nvidia Vera-based server equipped with four RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell graphics cards will not be cheap.

In the spirit of the times, Biwin, a well-known producer of solid-state drives and memory modules, announced that it had signed a two-year 3D NAND memory agreement worth $1.86 billion, the company told us at Computex 2026. We then dug up the announcement in a filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange. The amount of money the company plans to spend on flash memory exceeds 50% of Biwin's annual revenue, demonstrating how committed SSD makers are to securing NAND supply amid shortages. Biwin's disclosure comes after several other companies assumed massive amounts of debt to secure supply, and crushing shortages have forced customers into ever-longer long-term supply agreements (LTAs).

Under the terms of the agreement, Biwin will purchase $1.86 billion worth of 3D NAND memory from an unknown supplier over a period of 24 months that starts on June 30, 2026. Both bit volume and pricing are fixed, so Biwin will get its memory at the fixed price no matter how high spot or contract prices are at the time. Of course, this represents risks if NAND prices drop in the next two years, though industry observers believe that NAND supply to SSD module makers will worsen in 2027, so Biwin's risks seem to be manageable.

"The total committed purchase amount under the Contract is US$1.8608 billion, and the commitment period is 24 months," Biwin's filing with the Shanghai Stock Exchange reads. "In accordance with the Contract, both quantity and price are fixed. The Company will complete purchases in batches from the third quarter of 2026 through the second quarter of 2028."

Biwin is among the world's biggest branded suppliers of SSDs, though with a 10% market share in 2024, it cannot rival Kingston or NAND makers themselves. The company's willing to spend $1.86 billion could enable it to grow its market share, or just supply SSDs to large customers, such as hyperscalers that demand a stable supply. At the same time, the purchase commitment that represents over 50% of Biwin's annual revenue shows how difficult it is becoming for the company to get its NAND, with some even commenting that the spot market could dry up in the future as companies are forced to sign LTAs instead. The big question is whether other SSD makers without their own NAND memory will follow through.

What strikes the eye in the announcement is that the procurement volume for 2026 accounts for 4.45% of Biwin's total NAND flash purchases in 2025, which indicates that the company is paying a fortune for a relatively low volume of NAND. Meanwhile, the procurement volume for 2027 accounts for 14.88% of the company’s total NAND flash purchases in 2025, which further underlines the increased pricing of NAND.

It should be noted that for $1.86 billion, the company is 'locking in a portion of its baseline demand for the next 24 months,' which means that the amount of NAND memory it gets does not cover all of its needs. Yet, there is good news too: give the large scale of the company and its roadmap, the overall risk of the supply agreement is 'considered manageable.'

Remember those groundbreaking 8TB SD cards that Sandisk first unveiled back in 2024? After two long years, it appears they are ready for prime time. According to a recent report from news outlet Notebookcheck, multiple companies at Computex 2026 have reportedly confirmed that these high-capacity cards will begin shipping soon.

The upcoming 8TB SD cards conform to the SDUC (Secure Digital Ultra Capacity) standard, a category that the SD Association introduced for cards with capacities spanning from 2TB up to 128TB. Therefore, while 8TB of capacity is impressive, there's still headroom for bigger SD cards in the future. Similar to microSD Express, SDUC is an emerging standard and requires new hardware.

From a compatibility standpoint, these 8TB SDUC cards are not backward compatible with older card readers and devices. Sometimes, when new cards launch, they are backward compatible with existing hardware but run at lower speeds. However, that isn't the case for SDUC cards. They will require new card readers and devices that support them.

At the moment, there aren't any devices that support SDUC cards, so you can't use them even if Sandisk or other manufacturers started giving them away. It remains to be seen when, and by whom, the SDUC standard will be adopted. For example, the microSD Express standard was introduced in 2019 and remained dormant until the Nintendo Switch 2, which launched six years later. To date, Nintendo's handheld gaming console is the only device to have embraced microSD Express. Therefore, it will likely take some time before SDUC cards become mainstream.

According to the photograph that Notebookcheck snapped at Computex 2026, Sandisk will launch 4TB microSDUC and 8TB SDUC cards under its Ultra lineup. It's a surprising move since the Extreme Pro lineup is superior and typically offers better performance.

The Sandisk Ultra 4TB microSDUC and 8TB SDUC cards conform to the UHS-I speed class, which means a theoretical maximum read and transfer speed up to 104 MB/s. They also carry the V10 and A1 ratings, equivalent to a minimum sustained write speed of 10 MB/s. Meanwhile, the Sandisk Extreme Pro 4TB SDUC card still maintains the UHS-I certification but flaunts a V30, guaranteeing a minimum write speed of 30 MB/s.

Although several manufacturers reportedly told Notebookcheck that these 8TB SDUC cards will "hit the market shortly," they didn't provide any hints on potential launch dates or estimated MSRP. We've reached out to Sandisk for more details and will update the story when the vendor replies.

For perspective, Sandisk sells the Extreme Pro 2TB microSD card for $569.99 and the Extreme Pro 2TB SD card for $549.99, which are double what the 1TB variant costs. Assuming Sandisk follows the same pricing scheme, the manufacturer's looming 4TB microSDUC and 8TB SDUC cards could be pushing price tags close to $1,200 and $2,200, respectively.

Popular Right to Repair activist Louis Rossman is threatening to take Samsung to court for not replacing his personal 4TB 990 Pro SSD that failed within the drive’s warranty period. In a YouTube video, Rossman shared back-and-forth emails he had with Samsung support in his attempt to get the drive replaced under warranty, which ultimately failed. Instead, the SSD maker offered to refund him for the drive, citing a lack of stock despite the drive being listed on Amazon at Samsung's own store for $949 with plenty of stock. Rossman demands that Samsung replace the drive itself instead of providing a refund, and is now suing to force the matter.

Rossman says that the drive was anything but abused, making his circumstance all the more unfortunate. The 990 Pro was reportedly operating under a heatsink with two 80mm fans attached to it to ensure the heatsink remained cool. The only good news in this story is that the 990 Pro was part of a RAID 1 array, so Rossman did not lose any data on the drive.

Rossman sent all necessary information, including error logs proving his 990 Pro SSD was dead, and Samsung responded to Rossman affirming everything he stated in his email and agreeing that the drive appeared to be dead according to the logs he provided.

However, Samsung responded to Rossman after testing the drive, with test results showing that the drive was healthy and working properly. Samsung then ghosted Rossman, and in another email, sent him a tracking number for his own drive. After getting the drive back, Rossman tested it again on his own testing equipment and found the drive was still not functioning correctly.

Rossman then threatened to take the SSD manufacturer to court in Austin, Texas, if a new 4TB 990 Pro is not sent to him within 60 days. Samsung ultimately replied and offered him a cash refund, citing a lack of stock to replace the drive. Rossman found the drive in plentiful supply on Samsung's own Amazon store for $949.

Per the terms of many warranties, companies do have the option to repay the original purchase cost of a product if the company cannot repair or replace the product. However, Rossman asserts that since the drive is in stock and readily available at the higher price, Samsung is therefore compelled to issue him a replacement drive.

The wording of Samsung's warranty mentions several factors:

"{...}during the limited warranty period, and subject to the conditions and exceptions stated in this Agreement, Samsung will, at its option, either: (1) repair or replace the Product with new or refurbished Product of equal or greater capacity and functionality; or (2) refund the then current market value of the Product at the time the warranty claim is made to Samsung if Samsung is unable to repair or replace the Product." [emphasis added]

Notably, Samsung's warranty states it can optionally refund the current market value of the drive. Now it will be up to a court to decide if Rossman can compel them to send him a physical replacement instead of cash compensation. Rossman plans to take Samsung to court in Texas over the matter immediately after the statutory 60-day wait time.

The patent application for the floppy disk was granted to two IBM engineers on this day in 1972. U.S. patent number 3668658A was for a “magnetic record disk cover” that described a rotary magnetic medium housed in a protective cover that cleaned and protected the surface. These first floppy disks were a rather large 8 inches in diameter, but had a capacity of just 80 kilobytes. They were actually floppy, like the 5.25-inch disks that readers may be more familiar with, and in contrast to the rigid plastic-encased 3.5-inch ‘save icons.’

So, floppy disks are officially 54 years old, based on the patent application's grant and publication dates. However, work on this portable storage medium began in 1967 as part of IBM’s Project Minnow. This project proposed “a flexible Mylar disk coated with magnetic material that could be inserted through a slot into a disk drive mechanism and spun on a spindle” as a form of portable/removable media, instead of tape or punched cards. Big Blue was also targeting a device cost under $200 and a media cost under $5.

IBM put these first 8-inch floppies into production in 1971, a year ahead of the patent date we are commemorating, alongside compatible drives, to offer a full solution. So folks were using these for several months ahead of the patent. Both the floppies and drives received their U.S. patents in 1972, as our headline states.

Despite its ungainly size, this first floppy disk format would be rather short on capacity, even compared to later, smaller form factors. IBM notes that it was first marketed to customers as capable of holding the same amount of data as 3,000 punched cards. That fits the era in which it was launched. However, other sources note this was equivalent to 80 kilobytes.

The next floppy disk milestone came in 1977, according to the IBM blog, when the Apple II was launched with 5.25-inch floppy drives. Steve Wozniak developed a recording scheme known as Group Coded Recording, which allowed 140 kilobytes of storage, quite a lot more than the standard single-density 90 kilobytes. Then Tandon introduced a double-sided drive in 1978, with DSDD-format floppies offering up to 360-kilobyte capacity.

In 1984, IBM would trump that with the high-density format with up to 1.2 megabytes of data storage on a 5.25-inch disk. In the same year, Apple launched the original Macintosh with a 400-kilobyte 3.5-inch floppy disk mechanism from Sony installed. IBM would refine this much more pocketable, rigid, portable disk with its 1.44 megabyte standard 3.5-inch floppy disks in 1986.

Floppies had a superb run, as far as computer technologies go. At their peak, “more than 5 billion floppy disks were sold annually,” notes IBM. Apple was again instrumental in change when, in 1998, it left tech journalists aghast by not equipping the new iMac with a built-in floppy drive.

In 2026, floppies are mere nostalgia for most computer enthusiasts. Though from time to time we still uncover surprising niches that time and new tech have forgotten, like the San Francisco Muni Metro, in New Jersey prisons, and the German Navy.

M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs continue to be in demand and, thanks to the nature of portable computing, they need to be capacious and power-efficient. Add the desire for travel reliability, and you end up wanting a more OEM-like experience, something Acer knows how to deliver well. You don’t need the fastest drive, but you need one that works and, hopefully, always will. That’s where the MA200 comes into play.

It’s not fancy. It’s not record-breaking. It just delivers good performance everywhere it matters – random read latency is quite good – with solid power consumption numbers. The biggest drawback is probably that it’s limited to just 1TB. 2TB would definitely be better, but given the price of drives today, perhaps 1TB is a more realistic target, anyway.

Acer MA200 Specifications

The Acer MA200 is only available at 512GB and 1TB, although the 1TB should be far easier to find. Neither was available at the time of review, but historical pricing indicates they are priced at $80+ and $200+, respectively. We’re seeing ~$135 for 1TB and $140+ for 1TB in the market right now for M.2 2230, while similar hardware is priced at $200+ for 1TB. The drive’s last available price of $201.09 is about right. Technically, you could find four in stock on Amazon at the time of review for $190.76, but we cannot guarantee that. However, that would be competitive with TLC-based drives in this range.

The drive is rated for up to 5,200/4,700 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, and up to 700K/850K random read and write IOPS. The 1TB variant has significantly better performance because it has more flash dies, and that is what we would recommend. It also makes sense for an M.2 2230 upgrade, and it’s really the only SKU we’ve seen available, anyway. Acer backs it with a five-year warranty and the standard 600TB of writes at 1TB.

Acer MA200 Software and Accessories

The Acer MA200 is covered by Biwin Intelligence, “multifunctional management software for SSDs…designed to support Biwin consumer-brand storage products.” Biwin works with Acer, HP, and others on drive development, including software support. Biwin Intelligence is an SSD toolbox with an array of features: S.M.A.R.T. and drive health monitoring, drive erase, data backup/cloning/migration, firmware updates, error testing, and performance testing. This should cover most, if not all, of your needs.

Acer MA200: A Closer Look

Single-sided, M.2 2230 SSD. There’s nothing special going on here. If you haven’t worked with an M.2 2230 SSD before, then the small size of this thing will surprise you. It was unthinkable to find 1TB at this performance level in a package so small not that long ago. Now, you can have the perfect drive for your Steam Deck. No frills, but it doesn’t need them.

Underneath the green label is the DRAM-less Silicon Motion SM2269XT SSD controller and a single NAND flash package. No DRAM, but we do see the power management circuitry. The controller is an older, entry-level Gen 4 part that competes primarily with the Phison E21T and InnoGrit IG5220. We’ll discount options from Realtek and TenaFe as they are still less common. These controllers were great in their heyday, offering incredible performance and power efficiency for a budget drive at the time. Now, the technology is aged, but the rising price of hardware has seen its return.

This is all perfectly fine if the flash plays along. Luckily, the MA200 has Micron’s 176-Layer TLC, which, although now on the older side, is quite good flash. It’s more than enough for a drive in this form factor. While it’s nice to reach higher speeds than this – say, 7 GB/s rather than “just” 5 GB/s – the fact is you rarely need that level of performance in a system that takes M.2 2230 SSDs. Power efficiency and latency are more important benchmarks than bandwidth, in our opinion.

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Comparison Products

There’s no shortage of competition for the MA200. First, we have the high-end drives, the Crucial P310 and the Corsair MP600 Mini (E27T). Next, we have the mid-range drives with the Kingston NV3 and, arguably, the WD Black SN770M. Lastly, we have the first generation of Gen 4 M.2 2230 drives. These include the TLC-based Sabrent Rocket 4 and the QLC-based Silicon Power UD90, the Addlink S91, and the TeamGroup MP44S. The MA200 fits into this last group on paper, but often punches above its weight.

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 MA200 just edges out the NV3, delivering pretty solid performance in 3DMark. Although the NV3 uses QLC, the newer BiCS8 is very fast in this benchmark, with low latency, and therefore serves as a good baseline to beat. The MA200 can’t match the newer, faster MP600 Mini E27T or P310, but it beats the rest of the lineup. This is superb positioning, and the 44 µs latency result is honestly great. Anything at or below 45 µs should be considered exceptional, as even older drives of this generation – the S91 and MP44S – are significantly less responsive.

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 MA200 hits exactly that 45 µs point in PCMark 10, which we like to see. This is more of a psychological number or rule-of-thumb because in most cases you’re not going to usually notice a difference of even 10 µs in practice. However, it’s often indicative of broader performance patterns that emerge under certain workloads and when the drive is older and fuller. Having a responsive drive from the get-go is a bonus; if you do hit some of the worst states, you will feel the difference.

The drive doesn’t beat the NV3 here – did we mention how good BiCS8 QLC flash is? – but it stands up to the very good SN770M and most other drives. The P310 stands apart as Crucial simply nailed it with that drive. Sadly, its availability will be limited as the manufacturer withdraws from the market.

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 which limits 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 also as an option. This testing section is instead designed to give an idea of Linux performance, which does involve the use of Proton.

The MA200 is generally underwhelming in our Steam Deck tests, except for temperature. It ran the coolest among the drives, and this is an important consideration. Performance-wise, and especially for games, the differences between the drives are pretty minor. Once you have the game loaded, you won’t notice anything. On the other hand, a cooler-running drive may live longer, heat the handheld console less, and reduce the impact on battery life by a very small degree. Our feeling is that a certain threshold should be crossed – older Gen 3 drives will feel lethargic on some of these tests – and the MA200 meets that threshold. On the other hand, it’s clear that the P310 is a faster drive if you must absolutely own the fastest.

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.

Getting back to Windows, let’s look at file transfers. The MA200 is middle-of-the-road and definitely not a competitor to newer drives with the E27T controller, like the P310 or MP600 Mini. It belongs more with the previous crop of drives, which includes the Rocket 4 and SN770M. For the Steam Deck, this is perfectly fine. In a Gen 4 device, where you might be multi-booting Windows, there are better drives available. We think the MA200 is plenty for a gaming focus, 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 biggest takeaway from our ATTO results is that the MA200 hits a wall due to the drive's interface limitations. The controller is only rated at around 5 GB/s, which caps how much bandwidth the drive can provide. This is not an issue for PCIe 3.0 host devices, but is more limited with 4.0. In general, bandwidth is not what makes your apps and games feel faster or more responsive. It does impact transfer rates in some cases and, to a small degree, a drive’s latency. For an M.2 2230 drive, we do not feel the MA200’s results here are damning, but there are definitely faster drives out there.

The performance shortfalls here do translate to CDM: sequential performance is generally weak. The drive is good enough with QD1 reads, though, that we feel confident it won’t impact your experience much. On the contrary, the sub-44µs QD1 4K random read latency suggests this is a very responsive drive where it matters. Is it a drive you want for high-speed transfers? Absolutely not. But why would you buy an M.2 2230 drive for that? If you are looking for absolute performance in your Gen 4 portable system, though, this drive would not be our first choice. We’d probably recommend the MP600 Mini E27T or the equivalent – some other manufacturers have updated their E21T models, such as Sabrent – to reach peak performance. The P310 is up there, but as it is QLC-based and leaving the market, we can’t safely recommend it.

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 MA200 first writes to its cache at over 4.8 GB/s for more than 63 seconds. The 305GB cache is quite ample, but does not use all of the flash available to the TLC-based drive. This means the drive falls into an intermediate direct-to-flash state, writing at around 1.9 GB/s. This is very good and is plenty fast if you happen to get into this situation with aggressive writing. Eventually, the drive is forced to fold and writes at about half this speed, averaging just under 900 MB/s. Folding will often be below one-half the native flash speed while you’re waiting for already-written data to be moved from the cache to native flash, freeing space for incoming writes. So, two writes for every one write of new data.

Our steady-state average, though, is double the folding speed and closer to the native speed, at almost 1.8 GB/s. This is because the drive will free up space over time and can recover to higher speeds, even the cache speed at times. This performance is less consistent, though, and latency will be higher as the drive is bottlenecked. You’re most likely to hit this state when the drive is fuller or after substantial writes – lots of game installs and updates, OS updates, and so on. The MA200’s performance level here is very good and, mixed with the temperature results we saw above, means that the drive should be particularly good for what an M.2 2230 drive is used for, namely portable gaming and computing.

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.

We expected the MA200 to be power-efficient, and it is. It’s right in the middle of the pack with good power efficiency for a drive in this form factor. The peak power draw is 3.99W, which is below the 4.50W maximum stated by S.M.A.R.T. This is normal. What we would point out is that this peak draw is significantly lower than the fastest drives and, further, that idle power consumption – which in our testing is done in a worst-case state – is exceptionally low. We’re plenty satisfied here.

As for temperature, we measured a maximum of 71 degrees Celsius during testing. This is 15 degrees Celsius below the first throttling state, which is good but not great. We suspect a few things are going on here. First, this is an M.2 2230-form-factor drive with less surface area for cooling. Having a thermal pad or equivalent in your device would help. Second, the drive’s reported temperatures were very close to each other, so the reported temperatures might not be as comparable as we see with other drives. This is because there are multiple heat-producing regions on an SSD – the controller and flash, at least – and a composite temperature is often used to help with throttle determination. This means that 71 degrees Celsius might not be as hot as it seems. Lastly, our testing doesn’t necessarily translate to what you’d get in a pure PCIe 3.0 slot, as in the Steam Deck. The drive will run cooler in the Deck versus in a Gen 4 device.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

Acer MA200 Bottom Line

The Acer MA200 is a good drive, but not great. We’re seeing a lot of drives fall into this category, as what’s left after the SSD apocalypse leaves a lot to be desired – fast drives are prohibitively expensive if you can even find them, and some of the lower-end drives are outright dreadful. This is because the number one cost for SSDs, the flash memory, has skyrocketed, and we see no end in sight. This means it doesn’t make much sense to pair good flash with a slower controller that saves you a few dollars. In cases where this seems to happen – the Seagate FireCuda X1070 comes to mind – it can be a fair trade-off. It’s more sensible to drop down to a slow controller with leftover NAND. On the high end of things, the newest silicon, which for SSD controllers would be 6/7nm, is also facing a shortage due to semiconductor demand, so truly high-end drives are being priced out. Market trends suggest Gen 5 drives will remain out of reach. That leaves drives like the MA200.

Then again, the MA200 isn’t trying to be your typical drive. It’s in the M.2 2230 form factor, so it's targeted at specific devices like the Steam Deck. It doesn’t have to be as fast, so hitting 5 GB/s is good enough for a Gen 4 drive. The flash is very responsive for random workloads, the sustained performance is good, and the drive is power-efficient. What else could you want? Well, we’d like availability and affordability, especially at 2TB, since devices have been coming with larger default drives over time. On the other hand, we’re seeing a slide back on that due to rising memory and storage costs, so maybe 1TB is making more sense again. With flash being the most costly component, the price scaling is coming from there.

In either case, we would like the MA200 to be faster and, if possible, more power-efficient. We would like many things. As it is, though, the drive delivers where it matters for a drive in this form factor. It’s good enough. Its historical pricing has been competitive, and it won’t feel like an old drive in your new handheld. If you’re a stickler for having TLC flash, then it hits that mark, too. So, we can recommend it, even if it’s not the most exciting drive around. We’ll take an unexciting but reliable drive in M.2 2230 if we have the choice.

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SSD pricing hit record highs in Q1 2026 amid high demand and insufficient supply of 3D NAND memory for consumer applications. Nonetheless, there are bright spots, too: Silicon Motion has managed to increase revenues from its SSD controllers business this year, particularly because sales of higher-end devices were high. Nonetheless, while the company is confident of demand from the data center sector, it also expects disparity between supply and demand for consumer applications to get worse going forward.

“Our high-end controller is selling very well, including PCIe 4.0 and PCIe 5.0 controllers, UFS 3.1 and eMMC 4.1,” Nelson Duann, senior vice president of Silicon Motions' client business unit, said in an interview with Tom’s Hardware. “But the low-end part [of the business is suffering as] consumer demand going down. But as ASP [of high-end controllers] is higher, it compensates [dropping sales of lower-end controllers]. So that is why our revenue momentum is still going up.”

Indeed, Silicon Motion’s first quarter sales were $342.1 million, up 23% quarter-over-quarter and 105% year-over-year, with sales of SSD controllers up 40% - 45% YoY. Apparently, the company managed to increase sales of both consumer and enterprise-grade controllers. In the latter case, the company ramped up shipments of its PCIe 5.0 SSD controllers as demand from the data center segment was particularly high.

But while demand from AI and cloud sectors is not going anywhere and the company is probably going to sell a boatload of enterprise-grade SSD controllers, the biggest question about client applications is whether NAND memory supply constraints are going to ease anytime soon. Apparently, they are not; they are going to get worse.

“For the second half of this year, I expect the situation to remain largely unchanged; supply will stay very tight,” Duann said. “2027 is going to be the worst [from NAND supply perspective]. […] Looking ahead to next year, NAND makers are very pessimistic. They tell us supply conditions will become even worse because CSPs and data center operators continue to increase their demand. As a result, NAND suppliers have little choice but to focus their allocation on the data center market.”

This does not mean that major NAND memory producers will not supply flash for consumer applications at all; they will, so we are going to see new products announced and shipped. However, the supply and demand disparity on this side of the NAND business is expected to get worse in 2027.

“They still want to maintain some supply for consumer products, such as client devices, and a smaller share for automotive applications, but those allocations are not enough to change the overall situation,” Duann said.

While this is certainly not a good situation for consumers, for companies like Silicon Motion, it may not be that bad. SSD makers may reduce the capacity of their drives to meet unit demand, which means that they will still buy SSD controllers and, in some cases, even increase their controller purchases.

The full interview with SMI's Nelson Duann will be published later this month.

TeamGroup showed Tom's Hardware a new external SSD with a remote “self-destruct” function at Computex 2026. The T-Create Expert P35SG External SSD offers a “wireless one-click data destruction” function, letting you wipe the contents of the storage device remotely with a single text message.

The drive is connected wirelessly via 4G LTE to ensure that the user can still reach it even when not connected to Wi-Fi or to another device. Once it receives the wipe command, it triggers a “deep-level logical wipe” of the drive and then executes a high-voltage “physical hardware breakdown” to ensure that its contents are unrecoverable. This new drive arrived on the show floor nearly a year after TeamGroup revealed the P250Q-M80 M.2 SSD that had a similar physical self-destruct function.

Aside from this wireless high-security external drive, the company also unveiled the T-Create Expert P35S, which offers the same “self-destruct” function, but through a physical button right on the drive. There’s also the P33 External SSD, which includes an e-Paper display that can show important information like available storage capacity, drive health, drive name, and other information. This lets you see what a particular USB drive contains without needing to plug it into a device or place an external label on it.

There’s also the T-Create Expert AI 4R CUDIMM — this quad-rank CUDIMM packs in two rows of DRAM chips on both sides, giving a single RAM stick 128GB capacity. The sample DDR5 RAM was installed on an MSI MEG Z890 Unify-X that offers two RAM slots, giving it a total capacity of 256GB. We’ve seen other vendors like Origin Code bring 4R CUDIMMs to market, too, and this high-capacity RAM, which could potentially go as high as 256GB per stick, is quite useful for AI developers and enthusiasts who need the massive amounts of memory for AI agents.

Gamers gets goodies from T-Force too

Aside from the professional and creator-focused T-Create product line, TeamGroup also introduced new RAM kits, SSDs, and associated accessories from T-Force. The most interesting new device is the T-Force Liquid II SSD cooler, which brings liquid cooling to SSDs. This cooling solution is designed to sit on an exposed SSD and uses aluminum alloy heatsink fins, a micro cooling fan, and a liquid coolant (available in multiple colors) to help keep your high-performance storage drive cool. The coolant itself is designed to last five years and could be topped up as necessary.

There’s also the T-Force DARK RGB desktop memory kits, which are designed for low-profile builds with a maximum height of just 42mm. Despite its lower height, this RAM kit still features 6400 MT/s speed and a full RGB light strip. It’s also available in various capacities up to 64GB, making it an ideal solution for enthusiasts looking for an SFF build.

And, in celebration of 10 years of T-Force, TeamGroup also released several carbon-fiber-themed products. These include the T-Force Delta RGB DDR5, T-Force Xtreem DDR5, T-Force Z54E M.2 PCIe 5.0 SSD, M400 RGB External SSD, and the T-Force Vulcan and Delta LPCAMM2 DDR5 memory.

We expect these products to drop in the coming weeks and months, although we weren't able to confirm exact availability dates. Nonetheless, we can't wait to get our hands on some of these new solutions and see how they match up against the best RAM and SSDs we have available at the moment.

Phison's booth at Computex 2026 had its new PCIe 6.0 SSD controller, dubbed the X3, on display, with claims of up to 28 GB/s of sequential throughput and 6.8 million IOPS in random read/write workloads. The company also had performance benchmarks for its new DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 SSD controller, the E37T, on display, demonstrating similar performance to its popular flagship E28 controller while sipping nearly half the power, setting the stage for a new wave of power-efficient SSDs that will run cool.

Phison's 16-channel X3 controller is now nearing completion. The firm demoed this same PCIe 6.0 x4 controller at CES on a large test validation motherboard, but now it is finalized enough to be crystallized down into reference SSD designs, signaling it is almost ready for sampling. The company tells us the controller will sample to customers in December, and then ship in volume in mid-2027.

The controller is spec'd to deliver 28 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput and up to a blistering 6.8 million random read/write IOPS. Peak storage capacity weighs in at an incredible two petabytes; yes, 2 petabytes per SSD. Power efficiency is a focus for this controller, with Phison claiming 4 GB/s per watt, which works out to a total power draw of 7 Watts. The controller supports all the latest specs, like NVMe 2.3, OCP v2.6, and a full suite of security features. Phison's two reference designs come in data center-focused E3.S and E1.S form factors, but it's logical to assume that we'll see variants of this in the consumer M.2 form factor in the future.

As you can see in the album above, Phison also has a full suite of PCIe 6.0 redrivers, retimers, and cabling being readied for launch, giving it a robust suite of PCIe 6.0 IP for the next wave of storage devices and systems.

Phison also had its reference SSD design with a DRAM-less PS5037-E37T controller up and running on a laptop. The demo sported 14,239 MB/s of sequential read throughput and 12,307 MB/s of sequential write performance, which is roughly equivalent to the speed of its flagship DRAM-equipped E28 controller. The drive is also spec'd to 3 million random read/write IOPS, all of which comes courtesy of 4800 MT/s BiCS NAND. That top-tier NAND isn't available on the market yet, but it is clear that it is headed to shelves soon.

The company says this controller delivers 14.9 GB/s while sipping a mere 4.5W, a full 2.5W less than its flagship DRAM-equipped E28. Naturally, the DRAM-less design will also have cost savings attached, given that the price of any kind of DRAM is currently apocalyptic. The E37T will begin shipping this year.

While high-end SSDs with eight-channel controllers approached peak read speeds of around 14 GB/s years ago, mainstream drives with quad-channel controllers often offer around 11 GB/s. However, with new types of 3D NAND that feature a higher-speed interface, it is possible to get to 14 GB/s with just four NAND channels. This is exactly what Silicon Motion’s SM2524XT controller is designed to do: it has four NAND channels that support transfer rates of up to 4,800 MT/s and can offer up to 14 GB/s read speeds.

Silicon Motion’s SM2524XT controller is based on four (presumably Arm Cortex-R-series) cores, does not use DRAM, and complies with the NVM 2.0 specification. The unit has four NAND channels supporting data transfer rates of up to 4,800 MT/s as well as a PCIe 5.0 x4 host interface. The platform supports the latest types of 3D TLC and 3D QLC NAND and features SMI’s NANDXtend LDPC ECC technology to cope with the inevitable read errors of the latest flash memory, though Silicon Motion hasn't disclosed the generation of the NAND or the codeword size.

The company says the controller can deliver up to 2.5 million random IOPS alongside sequential read speeds reaching 14 GB/s, which is a very good result for mainstream solid-state drives. SMI uses TSMC’s services to produce the controller using a 6nm-class process technology.

Compared to its predecessor introduced about a year ago, the SM2524XT boosts random workload throughput by as much as 25%, reduces latency, and improves responsiveness during the fragmented read/write operations typical of KV cache and AI inference tasks. In fact, KV cache and enhanced AI inference performance are among the key advantages of the new SSD controller platform.

“KV Cache has become a critical factor in AI inference performance, driving the need for sustained high random read/write throughput and low-latency data access,” said Nelson Duann, Senior VP of Client & Automotive Storage Business at Silicon Motion. “As AI PCs evolve to support increasingly complex Local Agent and on-device LLM workloads, the SM2524XT is designed to deliver the random I/O performance, latency stability, and power efficiency required for next-generation AI storage architectures.”

KV cache is a storage area used by AI models to keep previously processed data so the model does not need to recalculate it for every new token. While this significantly reduces compute overhead, it also creates massive amounts of small, random, latency-sensitive memory and storage accesses. While this may not be a big problem in the data center environment, it may create performance bottlenecks when AI workloads run locally on a PC with a relatively limited DRAM capacity. As a result, latency and KV cache performance may limit the performance of long-context and multi-agent workloads.

To address these performance penalties, the SM2524XT controller integrates several of Silicon Motion’s technologies, including Separated Command Address (SCA) technology, which separates command and address traffic inside the NAND interface and enables the controller to process both simultaneously (rather than serially) to lower latency, increase effective bandwidth, and therefore maintain predictable performance. As an added bonus, these technologies make SM2524XT useful not only for PCs but also for edge AI devices.

Silicon Motion will certainly demonstrate prototype drives based on its latest SM2524XT controller at the upcoming Computex trade show next week, which is when we learn when the company expects actual SSDs based on the chip to hit the market. Yet, it is safe to say that they are not going to arrive earlier than next year.

Huawei just released a new storage device designed for AI inference and data centers with capacities of 61.44TB and 122.88TB; a 245TB variant is expected to arrive in the future. What made these SSDs interesting, though, was not their massive capacities but the technology behind them. Since the company cannot acquire high-layer-count 3D NAND chips from foreign suppliers needed for high-capacity storage, it instead uses Die-on-Board (DoB) packaging to mount more NAND dies directly on the PCB. Blocks & Files reported that this allowed the company to cram more NAND dies without stacking, thereby increasing density to circumvent BGA/TSOP packaging limits.

Samsung already announced 3D NAND with more than 400 layers, but these chips use American technology that is off-limits to Huawei. The U.S. Department of Commerce added Huawei to its Entity List in 2019, effectively cutting off the company from U.S.-origin technology. Aside from making it difficult, if not impossible, to buy American hardware, software, and IP, it also barred the company from accessing any technology based on or made with U.S. input. So, because the most advanced 3D NAND chips use American technology, even non-U.S. companies making them, like Samsung or SK hynix, cannot sell these chips to Huawei.

YMTC, China’s premier storage chip maker, offers its Xtacking 4.0 3D NAND tech, but it’s limited to 232 layers. This less-dense layout puts Huawei at a disadvantage, as its SSDs would have less capacity than competitors’ offerings that use more advanced 3D NAND. But instead of waiting on its suppliers to catch up, the Chinese tech giant’s researchers used their creativity to build an alternative that skirted Washington’s sanctions through DoB packaging.

DoB ditches traditional NAND packaging and puts the NAND dies directly on the SSD’s PCB. This allows Huawei to increase the capacity of its storage devices while using YMTC’s less dense NAND dies. Aside from that, it’s also more cost-effective than traditional NAND packaging as it eliminates several expensive processes. Still, Huawei had to address several challenges when using DoB, such as thermal management and signal integrity, but it seems to have addressed them with the launch of its OceanDisk 1800.

Even though Huawei has been locked out of American tech for several years now, it continues to thrive and remains one of the biggest tech companies in China and around the world. It has also continued to innovate in response to the limitations that Washington placed on it, sometimes relying on sheer numbers to achieve parity. For example, the AI CloudMatrix cluster could beat the Nvidia GB200 in performance, but it uses 4x the power to do so.

As Beijing continues to block the Nvidia H200 at the border, even expanding the import ban to the RTX 5090D V2, Chinese AI firms have no choice but to buy locally made AI chips like those from Huawei. This, in turn, would funnel a ton of revenue toward Chinese chipmakers, allowing them to invest more in research and development and to decouple from U.S. tech.

A class-action lawsuit was filed against nearly every major hard drive suspension assembly maker, alleging that said companies' price-fixing efforts resulted in higher drive prices for resellers and end users. Should the lawsuit succeed, U.S. resellers and end users who purchased hard drives or computers including them could be eligible for monetary compensation. This suit is a stateside counterpart to the 2019 Canadian class action covering the same matter.

The documents were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and name two groups of defendants, one related to TDK Corporation and the other to NHK Spring. The assemblies produced by these firms are reportedly found in 97% of worldwide HDDs, so it's reasonable enough to assume drives from all major HDD brands are covered by this lawsuit — to wit, Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba.

There is no court date set, and the press release specifically mentions that there's no guarantee that the lawsuit will succeed. However, the case is a direct continuation of a 2019 antitrust lawsuit against the same suspension makers. Over in the northern lands, the Canadian courts have already certified the class action and rejected an appeal against it in 2022. While these facts don't guarantee a payout on either country, they're positive indicators nonetheless.

Suspension assemblies are one of the critical components in a hard drive, as they move the read-write head (the tip of the "needle" you see in hard drive internals), and must be spectacularly precise in both manufacturing and functionality, especially considering the magnetic density of contemporary hard drive platters. It's rather mesmerizing to watch them at work.

The price-fixing scheme allegedly ran from January 2003 to December 31, 2016, raising hard drive manufacturing prices, which were then passed on to customers. As with most class-action lawsuits, end users have the option to drop from the class action and pursue separate legal action against the suspension makers, or stay in it and hope for a cheque at the end of the proceedings. There's a dedicated website for anyone who wants to opt out, an action that can be taken until August 23, 2026.

Researchers at the University of Tokyo say they have demonstrated a non-volatile magnetic switching device capable of flipping states in just 40 picoseconds while consuming unusually little power and generating far less heat than many previous ultrafast switching approaches — potentially addressing one of the biggest problems facing modern AI hardware: the enormous energy and cooling demands created by moving and storing data.

The researchers built the device using an antiferromagnetic material called manganese-tin (Mn₃Sn), then showed that ultrashort electrical pulses could reliably switch its magnetic state while retaining the stored information after power removal. They also demonstrated similar switching using ultrafast photocurrent pulses generated from a telecom-band laser and photodiode, effectively converting optical signals directly into memory-writing electrical pulses.

At its most fundamental level, modern computing is really the science of switching physical states. Every operation inside a computer — whether running a game, training an AI model, opening a browser tab, or loading a file from storage — ultimately involves billions or trillions of tiny physical state changes. Transistors switch on and off, memory cells charge and discharge, cache states update, data moves through interconnects, and storage cells trap or release electrons.

Those switching events are what physically represent binary information. The problem is that switching states requires energy, and almost all of that energy eventually becomes heat. That reality is becoming increasingly problematic in the AI era. Modern AI accelerators process enormous volumes of data. But much of their power consumption comes not just from computation itself, but from constantly moving and refreshing information between caches, memory, storage, and interconnects. As GPU clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of accelerators, power delivery and cooling are becoming some of the industry's biggest bottlenecks.

Current memory technologies all handle switching differently, but each comes with major tradeoffs. DRAM — the main system memory used in PCs, servers, and GPUs — stores information as electrical charge inside tiny capacitors. A charged capacitor represents one state, while a discharged capacitor represents another. However, those capacitors constantly leak charge, meaning the system must repeatedly refresh the memory cells thousands of times per second simply to preserve data. That constant re-switching consumes significant power and generates heat, even when systems are relatively idle.

Flash memory used in SSDs avoids that problem by trapping electrons in floating-gate structures, which retain data without continuous power. On the other hand, changing those states is slower and more energy-intensive, making flash unsuitable for high-speed working memory.

SRAM, used inside CPU caches, achieves extremely fast switching using transistor feedback circuits that continuously maintain state. But SRAM consumes significant chip area and power, making it expensive and difficult to scale to large capacities.

The industry has spent decades searching for a kind of "universal memory" that could combine the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM, the persistence of flash, and low power consumption. That challenge becomes even harder at ultrafast timescales, where many experimental switching technologies partially rely on brute-force heating to destabilize and flip states rapidly.

The faster the switching, the more severe the thermal problem often becomes. Several previously demonstrated picosecond-scale switching approaches cited in the paper involve temperature rises of several hundred Kelvin during operation.

The Tokyo researchers are instead pursuing a radically different switching mechanism through a field known as spintronics. Instead of storing information as an electrical charge, spintronic devices store information using magnetic states.

Conventional magnetic memories typically use ferromagnets — materials such as iron, cobalt, or nickel in which magnetic moments align in the same direction. The new device instead uses an antiferromagnetic material called Mn₃Sn, where neighboring magnetic moments largely cancel one another out.

Researchers are interested in antiferromagnets because they can potentially switch much faster, resist magnetic interference more effectively, and scale to smaller dimensions without generating large stray magnetic fields.

The researchers fabricated layered Mn₃Sn/Ta structures on silicon substrates and then used ultrafast electrical pulses to flip the material between two stable magnetic configurations, representing binary states.

Crucially, the switching mechanism is not primarily based on heating the material. Instead, the pulses generate what is known as spin-orbit torque — a process that transfers angular momentum directly into the magnetic structure itself, flipping the magnetic state without requiring extreme temperature spikes.

That distinction is the paper's central claim. The research is not merely about creating a new kind of memory, but about finding a potentially more energy-efficient way to switch digital states themselves. Currently, almost all electrical energy consumed by computing hardware eventually becomes heat. Modern AI infrastructure is already hitting serious power and cooling limits as GPU clusters scale to hundreds of thousands of accelerators.

The team's device reportedly achieved switching in just 40 picoseconds — roughly 1,000 times faster than typical nanosecond-scale memory switching. Normally, pushing switching speeds into the picosecond regime causes heat generation to spike dramatically, as systems often rely partly on intense transient heating to destabilize states quickly enough for reversal.

However, simulations in one device configuration showed temperature rises of only about 8 K (14.4°F) during switching, supporting the researchers' claim that the mechanism relies primarily on direct angular-momentum transfer rather than brute-force thermal switching. This also confirms that the Mn₃Sn device may avoid much of the heat problem that has plagued earlier ultrafast memory research.

The optical switching demonstration may also prove important for future data-center architectures. The researchers generated 60-picosecond photocurrent pulses using a telecom-band laser and photodiode, then used those pulses to switch the device's magnetic state.

That could eventually align with broader industry efforts toward optical interconnects and silicon photonics, where hyperscalers are increasingly seeking ways to move information using light rather than conventional electrical signaling.

If technologies like this ever become commercially viable, they could theoretically reduce memory refresh overhead, lower cooling requirements, reduce idle power draw, and potentially blur the distinction between memory and storage. For personal computing, that could someday translate into systems that retain working memory contents without standby power, resume instantly, and generate less heat. For hyperscale AI infrastructure, the implications would center more around power efficiency and cooling reduction across massive GPU clusters.

For now, however, the technology remains firmly experimental. The current devices are tiny laboratory structures rather than manufacturable memory chips, and the paper notes that the present implementation still requires an external bias magnetic field for deterministic switching — a major practical limitation for commercial hardware.

Manufacturing scalability, endurance validation, cost competitiveness, and integration with existing CMOS manufacturing processes also remain unresolved. The history of computing is full of promising "next-generation memory" technologies that never displaced mature DRAM or NAND ecosystems. Even so, the work highlights the growing reality in the computing industry that future performance gains may depend less on shrinking transistors and more on reducing the energy required to physically switch, move, and store information.

Noriyuki "hiyohiyo" Miyazaki, the developer of CrystalDiskInfo, has announced an important new feature in version 9.9.0: the ability to detect fake Samsung SSDs. The update is very useful given the sharp rise in counterfeit Samsung SSDs. When CrystalDiskInfo identifies a drive as inauthentic, it clearly labels the device with a [FAKE] label at the front to make it easy for users to spot the counterfeits.

Samsung makes some of the best SSDs on the market, which unfortunately makes their drives popular targets for counterfeiters. The Samsung Magician software is usually the first tool that comes to mind when you want to verify the authenticity of a Samsung SSD. However, recent updates to CrystalDiskInfo have introduced a similar verification feature, offering consumers a reliable third-party alternative.

While the developer has not provided an in-depth explanation of the technical details behind this detection method, they have shared that the function will rely on periodic updates for the time being. We suspect the program may be cross-referencing firmware and other S.M.A.R.T. data from the legit drives to weed out the bad ones. As a result, users may need to update CrystalDiskInfo regularly. Nonetheless, Miyazaki has expressed plans to roll out an improved version of the authentication feature in the near future.

In a test conducted with ITG Marketing, the tester demonstrated the effectiveness of CrystalDiskInfo’s new counterfeit-detection feature. The program quickly flagged a Samsung 990 Pro clone. Specifically, CrystalDiskInfo identified the PCI Vendor ID as belonging to a controller manufactured by Maxio, not Samsung. The firmware version also came out to 8888888, which is also bogus. It's easy for fraudsters to manipulate the physical labels and maybe even the name of how the drive shows up in Windows, but the controller's PCI Vendor ID is harder to falsify.

The verification feature is still a work in progress, which is why it requires regular updates. If you ever encounter a fake Samsung SSD, you can help contribute to improving CrystalDiskInfo’s detection feature. The developer encourages users to share their experiences by exporting the scan results as a text file and either emailing it directly to the developer or uploading it to the CrystalDiskInfo bulletin board.

CrystalDiskInfo, which has been around for 18 years now, is a powerful utility that reads the S.M.A.R.T. data from your storage drives and translates the cryptic raw values into valuable information we can understand. The program offers a wealth of information that spans from basic metrics, such as drive temperatures, to more advanced data, such as when helium starts to leak out of helium-filled hard drives.

CrystalDiskInfo has amassed over 90 million downloads during its lifetime. Miyazaki's commitment to improving the software has made it one of the best out there, and with the addition of this new Samsung SSD authenticity checker, it's more useful than ever.

One of the largest digital archaeology projects has hit a key milestone: Minecraft devotees have just completed downloading and archiving 24TB of data, preserving a million squared block region of the game’s infamous 2b2t server.

This milestone project is retold in the video above, and/or you can read more about the technical details behind the feat on a GitHub page maintained by one of the download team. The project was delivered thanks to the “thousands of dollars spent, and countless hours wasted,” writes Crayne (GitHub organizer), supported by Fuch, Mahan, Steve3, and many more avid Minecrafters.

The archived region comes from the oldest and most infamous ‘anarchy server’ in Minecraft, dubbed 2b2t. It was founded 16 years ago and has been running since then. A dose of anarchy is inevitable in this server/world as there are basically no rules, no bans, and an anything-goes culture permeates the place. Visitors will therefore notice 2b2t is full of griefed landscapes, ruined bases, and remnants of structures, new and old.

As some folks aren’t keen on the undiscovered history and hidden bases of 2b2t being snapshotted like this, the Minecraft archivists had to work carefully. The project was already a massive undertaking, with 24TB of data covering a million × million blocks area of the Overworld (and more) that took multiple enthusiasts years to survey and archive. If the archivists had been detected, some 2b2t players would very likely have hunted and killed their bots. But as of now, the following have been successfully downloaded:

• A 1,024,000² (1m²) area of the Overworld (Dec 25 2025 - Apr 13 2026),
• A 512,000² (512k²) area of the Overworld (Nov 11 2024 - Dec 12 2024),
• A 256,000² (256k²) area of the End (Jan 23 2026 - Feb 15 2026),
• A 100,000² (100k²) area of the Nether (Jun 9 2025 - Jun 14 2025)

So, how and where can you get this 24TB of 2b2t world data? The team says they will need “a few weeks” to create a torrent containing it all. Moreover, they're asking downloaders to be patient – which almost goes without saying for a 24TB archive. Separately, there will be high-res renders and data mining spreadsheets made available, too.

The Minecraft fans behind this project encourage those interested to check out their GitHub for open-source tools related to this massive archive. More large-scale world downloads are teased, so you can also connect with the project team via Discord, Patreon, and the aforementioned GitHub.

Memory and storage chip prices have been steadily increasing worldwide due to the AI-driven shortage. Still, Japanese consumers are being hit the hardest, with crazy prices appearing in multiple shops across Tokyo. According to Akiba PC Hotline! [machine translated], Samsung SSDs have increased by up to 300% in various computer retailers, with the top-of-the-line 8TB Samsung 9100 Pro going up as high as $3,470.97 USD (547,980 JPY) at the current exchange rate. By comparison, you can get the same drive on Amazon for just $1,960.69 — around 43% cheaper than what is offered among Japanese retailers.

The egregious pricing isn’t limited to large-capacity PCIe 5.0 drives either. The 4TB 9100 Pro with heat sink is priced at $1,773 USD (279,980 JPY), which is a 31.5% increase from its previous price, while the 2TB version is now at $893 (140,980 JPY). These examples are around double the prices of the same models here in the U.S., as you can see on our SSD price tracker. More “affordable” Samsung models like the 990 Pro, 990 Evo Plus, and even the 870 Evo didn’t escape the pricing hikes, either. When compared to their prices from January of this year, those drives have jumped in price by as much as 384.7%.

The Japanese news outlet also reports that the price hikes aren’t limited to Samsung drives, as Kioxia SSDs also saw recent price jumps of between 39.8% to 59.4%. This meant that the 2TB Exceria Pro G2 costs $594.68 USD (93,880 JPY), while the 1TB Exceria Basic now costs $208 (32,980 JPY). It’s not all bad news for Japanese buyers, though, as Western Digital (SanDisk), Lexar, and other less popular brands saw a price drop for Gen 4 and Gen 5 M.2 NVMe SSDs and SATA SSDs.

These are some of the highest price hikes we’ve seen across the world, so far. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that this will be the last price hike we’ll see, as PC makers are reporting increasing component costs that go beyond RAM and storage. Even other storage products like memory cards and flash drives saw price increases between 124% and 261%. Unfortunately, the average buyer cannot do anything but either pay the higher prices or wait until they go down in the distant future (if they ever do).

Nextorage is hoping the NEM-PAC will be the next drive you buy, and everything is in place for that to happen. This no-frills, heatsink-clad SSD has plenty of performance and a good warranty, but could appearances be deceiving? The Phison-linked company delivers a drive that’s hiding a Silicon Motion controller and Samsung flash, which does raise some questions. However, whether or not the drive is good is not one of them, as performance as a whole, in our testing, promises a good experience for any user. It’s not made for laptop users, but in every other way, it’s competitive at 1TB and 2TB capacities.

Nextorage NEM-PAC Specifications

The Nextorage NEM-PAC is available at 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, although we did not see the 4TB available at the time of review. Pricing comes in at $179.99 and $289.99 for the first two capacities. This puts it squarely up against the Biwin Black Opal NV7400, which makes sense as they have comparable hardware. The NEM-PAC hits up to 7,400 MB/s / 6,400 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and up to 1,000K / 1,050K random read and write IOPS. These numbers are right in line with expectations.

The drive also has the standard five-year warranty, but, importantly, is warrantied for up to 750TB of writes per TB capacity. The normal amount is 600TB, so this is 25% more than usual. This is not a huge difference, but it’s enough to swing things in the drive’s favor if that matters to you. Having a higher TBW rating can bring some extra peace of mind.

Nextorage NEM-PAC Software and Accessories

Nextorage offers no direct downloads for its drives. We recommend CrystalDiskInfo to check and monitor drive health and CrystalDiskMark for basic benchmarking. For backing up your data, we suggest MultiDrive for Windows – version 1.4 came out during the writing of the review – and Clonezilla for everything else.

Nextorage NEM-PAC: A Closer Look

A no-nonsense drive with a simple but effective heatsink. This is really all you need, unless you are putting it into a laptop. Removal of the heatsink via the side screws should be possible if absolutely necessary. If you intend to reuse a heatsink like this, make sure to replace thermal padding/adhesive as necessary.

What we have here is the four-channel, DRAM-less Silicon Smotion SM2268XT2 SSD controller with four NAND flash packages. Each package is labeled 512G, for 512GiB, which means this 2TB drive is single-sided. The flash is harder to discern, but we were able to pinpoint it as Samsung’s 236-Layer TLC. This is somewhat unusual to see, but Samsung flash popping up in drives does happen, given the current flash shortage. The controller choice already suggests that Nextorage is shopping around, so this flash showing up is not a full anomaly. This flash made its full debut with the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro, and it delivers good performance, particularly good random read performance, in our testing.

What’s more interesting is that Nextorage – once a property tied to Sony that was since acquired by Phison – uses an SMI controller. Things are tough out there. Phison also tends to pair with Kioxia/SanDisk or Micron flash, so seeing Samsung here is different. It’s not unusual for drives to mix things up, but we have to keep an eye on reliability when this happens. We expect a better floor for Nextorage – and the higher TBW supports this, which we feel remains intact.

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Comparison Products

The NEM-PAC faces some stiff competition, but luckily, its pricing keeps it competitive. Let's look at the landscape at the time of review. We have several drives that compete directly with the NEM-PAC's hardware, which is to say they have a high-end DRAM-less controller with TLC flash that is at most one generation behind. This includes the Inland TN470, Addlink A93, Biwin Black Opal NV7400, and the TeamGroup MP44. The remaining four drives stand apart in different ways.

The WD Black SN7100 uses a proprietary controller but also newer BiCS8 flash, which gives it incredible power efficiency. The Crucial P310 is using QLC flash but is tuned for high performance. There's also the Silicon Power UD90, which, at the time of its release, was a solid budget drive, but now it's aged, and if you buy it today, it could have inferior hardware. It's kind of par for the course to have random hardware in the budget zone, and the precise embodiment of that, the Kingston NV3, is probably the most common drive here.

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 NEM-PAC performs smack dab in the middle of our list of drives. This is neither good nor bad, but we think any drive that comes in at or below 45µs of latency in this suite is in good shape. This means the Black SN7100 makes the cut, and the NV3 does not. Older or slower Gen 4 drives like the UD90 stand no chance. That’s just how it shakes out – if you want a high-performance drive for games, you should skip the ultra-budget options.

On the surface, this may appear to be strange advice. Many games will show no load-time difference between these drives, and in most, the difference will be small at best. That’s not what we mean. We’re including the extremes – which could be games like Skyrim with tons of mods – and acknowledging the edge states of a drive. You may pack your drive to the brim and regularly install/uninstall large games. You’re not going to get the ideal, synthetic 3DMark performance out of the drive long-term doing that. If you want a drive that can handle that and still give you peak load times, you will want to shoot higher. The NEM-PAC hits that higher target.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

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

Gaming responsiveness is one side of the coin; application performance is the other. You may want one drive to do all things. If you only have one drive, the chance of it reaching an edge state – such as being very full – is higher. Luckily, the NEM-PAC is very solid in PCMark 10 with a clear lead over a whole batch of drives, some of which we consider to be good drives. This is no doubt in part because of the SMI controller, which, in our experience, has good real-world performance. For a PCIe 4.0 drive, it’s basically as good as it gets without DRAM.

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 NEM-PAC is designed for the PS5 with a perfectly compliant heatsink. It comes as no surprise that it performs excellently in the console. This drive will give you near-peak performance.

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.

If you have more than one drive, then it can be beneficial to look at read and write transfer rates. The copy transfer rate is mixed, although that is a workload you might do if you have a single drive. The NEM-PAC has no issues with the former two – it has a high read transfer rate and very high write transfer rate – but lags behind on the last. There are many possible reasons for this, including how the controller handles this type of workload with its internal optimizations, but the good news is that the drive is still quite fast. It surpasses the NV3 pretty easily and won’t feel slow against most PCIe 4.0 drives.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

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

ATTO is a good way to see a high-level view of how a drive performs across a variety of block sizes at QD1. Most consumer workloads – the things you do every day – are at lower QD with QD1 being the most common. Drives aren’t always optimized for QD1, which would include many enterprise drives, for example, as that’s not always the best optimization. In our experience, it does map to the user experience for consumer drives, but we’ve also found that ATTO only paints a general picture of a drive’s performance. We can see the NEM-PAC lags here, and that’s expected for this SMI controller, but does that really translate to issues at 4KiB and 1MiB? Those are the two most common block sizes tested.

That’s where CrystalDiskMark comes into play. QD1 sequential reads and writes are pretty average. The NEM-PAC needs some queue depth to run with the top drives. This matches our expectations from the ATTO results and does mean the drive has some weakness here. This isn’t surprising because, even though the SM2268XT2 controller is technically comparable to anything else out there, it’s most often used for budget drives. There are a number of reasons why the controller might be optimized this way, but ultimately it’s architectural and, potentially, a side effect of the effort to save on cost. This doesn’t mean the design is inferior, just different. It ends up being a fine trade-off as the sub-44µs 4KB QD1 random read latency is very competitive. So, some file transfers might not feel as perky, but your day-to-day responsiveness should be excellent.

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 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.

An SSD’s first, fastest mode lies in leveraging the pSLC cache. This cache is temporary and trades off space for speed. The NEM-PAC hits over 6.43 GB/s in this mode, able to hold this speed for over 95 seconds. We get a cache in the 610-615GB range. This is a very large cache, but not the largest it could be – 2TB of 3-bit TLC flash can have a cache up to at least 700GB. This bit of wiggle room on the NEM-PAC means it can degrade to a somewhat swift direct-to-TLC write mode at ~845 MB/s. This isn’t super fast, and for a four-channel drive, this is about half of what you could get with a good PCIe 3.0 drive. That’s almost a compliment because, frankly, the best PCIe 3.0 drives had DRAM, eight channels, and much smaller caches. The comparison just helps put things into perspective – this drive has twice the bandwidth potential and much better latency and, with half the channels, better power efficiency, all without compromising on sustained performance over the last generation.

Eventually, the drive will have no more runway and will be forced to start copying data over from the cache before it can handle incoming data. This “folding” mode is much slower than the others and will impact the user experience. For writes, performance breaks down to an average of 552 MB/s. This beats QLC-based drives and SATA SSDs, but is not fast compared to much of the competition. We think this is perfectly fine for a gaming drive or a primary drive used in typical machines. It’s not ideal for NAS work or some enthusiast content creator builds, though.

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

We have to say, the NEM-PAC’s power efficiency leaves something to be desired. It really should be closer to the NV3 in this test, which would put it right up with the full competition. Its idle power draw is right in line with the NV3, but the average and max power draw specs are surprisingly high. The P310 is close to it for those two metrics, but has higher efficiency, which suggests the NEM-PAC’s problem may be related to copy performance. Why would the drive hurt more than the NV3 here?

Given the drive’s higher TBW, we wouldn’t be surprised if Nextorage was being a bit on the cautious side. The reality is, most users don’t need crazy levels of performance for 99% of what they do. If you can protect the hardware at a small cost, it’s often a worthwhile trade-off. This translates to lower power efficiency in how we test, but it’s clear from the idle power consumption results that the NEM-PAC isn’t cutting corners. Our guess is that this is a deliberate firmware decision to improve longevity.

Our temperature results support this. The drive ends up with about 30C of headroom in our testing, which is massive. The drive runs exceptionally cool with its heatsink. Yeah, the drive pulls plenty of power, but it’s well-handled, which must be a conscious design decision. In our opinion, this indicates that the NEM-PAC is optimized for reliability. This makes perfect sense for a drive of this caliber, especially as performance as a whole isn’t bad. If the hardware is variable and could change over time, this is also a good way to ensure better consistency.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

Nextorage NEM-PAC Bottom Line

The Nextorage NEM-PAC is one of those drives that might go unnoticed, even though it does everything right that matters. The name is more well-known these days, sure, but buyers are often after either the big names or any name as the budget fits. This outcome makes sense since, really, Nextorage is a premium-like brand that is also grappling with the realities of the NAND flash and SSD markets. Despite its branding, it’s competing with the budget-minded Kingston NV3 at the same time. It also has powerful rivals like the MP44 that, at least with its launch hardware, offered a comparable experience with low pricing. Nextorage tries to stand out in a few ways.

The first is that it comes with a PS5-compliant heatsink. This is great for desktops and the console, and can often be removed for laptops. This is a common direction for drives to go – see the Addlink A93 – but Nextorage, in particular, has its roots with Sony’s console. A drive like this is another accessory that’s all but needed, and that’s often an easy sell. The NEM-PAC hits that note, but that’s not the end of the story. Nextorage also has higher TBW ratings on this drive and has hardware that doesn’t match our original expectations. This is a clear pivot towards handling the challenging SSD market, but we also think, given some of the performance results as well, that the company is leaning away from the ultra-budget NV3-like approach that, quite honestly, works well if you want a cheap PS5 drive. Rather, this is a solid desktop drive in its own right, and we think that was the intention.

Speaking of performance, the drive performs well where it matters, even when it’s not the fastest. It’ll provide a good experience no matter how you handle it. It’s not the most power-efficient drive, and it’s not the fastest for transfers, but if this is one of the least expensive options in its class – and the price at the time of review is reasonable – then it is a solid all-around pick. We are admittedly a bit more open to drives given current market conditions, but even in a normal environment, this drive would be a safe choice. It’s worth adding it to your list if you’re waiting on the right sale.

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The internet is getting harder to archive because the AI boom has caused a storage crisis, with both NAND and mechanical drives facing shortages. The same large-capacity HDDs now cost up to 3x more due to shriveled production capacities that have otherwise been entirely booked out by hyperscalers. These rising prices have made it difficult to preserve data at the usual rate across the industry, as reported by 404 Media.

The Internet Archive, whose mission is to provide "universal access to all knowledge," is one of the organizations affected by this crisis. It holds around 210 petabytes of archives, with another 100 terabytes added every day to collections like the Wayback Machine. Amidst the AI boom, maintaining it has become "a very real issue costing us time and money," founder Brewster Kahle told 404 Media.

The 28-30TB hard drives ideal for the job are simply out of stock or available at a grossly inflated price. Fortunately, Internet Archive has active donors and a passionate community of bit-rot fighters that help alleviate some of these concerns, but only by finding workarounds. The organization is also trying to source drives from manufacturers, but they're likely busy with backorders instead.

Wikimedia Foundation, the parent non-profit behind Wikipedia, shares similar sentiments, explaining how maintaining over 65 million articles already requires careful budget allocation, which the current turbulence has only exacerbated. A spokesperson told 404 Media that it sees "the primary impact in the purchase of memory and hard drives but also in terms of lead times on server deliveries and our capacity to place future orders."

Beyond the shortage, the AI boom has managed to affect archival efforts in another way that's likely not reversible: scraping. LLMs are trained on huge chunks of data often acquired from the internet, sometimes even illegally. As you'd expect, a lot of sites don't appreciate being randomly scraped to become part of some AI's learning material, so they've put up countermeasures that prevent companies from doing so.

Archiving the internet shares the same first step — it needs to extract information in order to preserve it, but website operators have been increasingly blocking such efforts. Bots that would otherwise scrape a site just to produce a snapshot for educational purposes are now being treated the same way as a bot looking to gather information for artificial intelligence, unintentionally or not.

People in the community who contribute to preservation efforts are also having to think twice about what to preserve. Since hard drives are so expensive now, even enthusiasts part of the r/DataHoarders subreddit are doom-posting about how they've stopped archiving entirely, waiting for prices to level out. You can occasionally find deals, but seeing a large-capacity drive at MSRP has become nearly impossible.

Those are regular individuals struggling to keep up with rising costs, while the larger non-profits are still managing to scrape by (pun intended). But what about the players in the middle? End of Term Archive, dedicated to archiving government websites between different administrations, is holding onto hope that things will settle down by the time they need to upgrade.

Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital are the only remaining manufacturers of hard disk drives. They not only continue to produce these storage devices but are also actively advancing them as demand for HDDs rises again. While hard drives from these companies share many similarities, each relies on a different set of underlying technologies — distinct recording methods, actuator designs, platter materials, and magnetic alloys, among others — resulting in markedly different roadmaps. In this story, we examine these roadmaps and attempt to make sense of them.

The state of the HDD market

The amount of data that the world generates is higher than ever now that not only people, but also machines generate well over 400 million terabytes of data every single day, according to estimates made in 2024. Most of that data ends up in data centers, so Gartner predicts that data center storage capacity requirements will increase at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.5% between 2024 and 2029 and will eventually reach 3.19 zettabytes (3.19 million PB, 3.19 billion TB). While a significant portion of that data will be stored on 3D NAND-based solid-state drives, the lion's share will reside on hard disk drives, as HDDs can still offer lower per-TB cost than even the cheapest NAND memory.

Hard drives have been around for nearly 70 years, and over 220 companies have produced HDDs since they were introduced in 1956. In 2026, only three hard drive manufacturers — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — remain on the market, and their supply chains are largely integrated or consolidated, meaning that the industry has largely shrunk from where it used to be a decade ago. Nonetheless, the combination of per-TB cost, storage density, and storage performance that HDDs offer makes them competitive enough, particularly in AI and traditional data centers, which need to store plenty of data that must be accessed relatively quickly and therefore placed 'near online', or nearline.

In fact, over 60% of hard drives shipped today are nearline HDDs, according to Nidec, the world's largest supplier of HDD motors. The remaining circa 40% are consumer and enterprise NAS hard drives, video surveillance HDDs, desktop HDDs (a declining category), external drives, laptop drives (an almost extinct category), and legacy high-performance enterprise HDDs (Toshiba only).

Nidec estimates that 119 million HDDs were shipped in its FY2023 (ending on March 31, 2024), and 125 million hard drives were shipped in its FY2024 (ending March 31, 2025), an indication that unit sales of mechanical storage devices are stable and are growing due to demand from AI and traditional data centers.

Unit sales of HDDs increased in calendar 2025 compared to calendar 2024, according to reports from Hoya (the only maker of glass substrates for HDD platters) and Resonac (the largest independent supplier of HDD platters), though exact numbers are unknown.

"While 2.5-inch substrates declined as forecasted, 3.5-inch substrates achieved double-digit growth, resulting in overall steady performance," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "Current demand is exceptionally strong and is expected to increase further. Preparations to enhance our supply capacity are also underway."

The road to 100TB and beyond

All HDD makers have adopted energy-assisted magnetic recording (EAMR) technologies, though everyone uses different methods. Seagate is ahead of the pack with its HAMR-based 44TB drive, which is shipping to two leading cloud service providers (CSPs), whereas Toshiba and WD are trailing the leader with their FC-MAMR and ePMR/ePMR2 recording technologies, as they pursue deliberately more cautious strategies.

Note: HDD makers tend to list maximum drive capacities with shingled recording. To that end, even if the table does not explicitly list SMR, presume that range-topping HDDs with leading capacity use shingled recording tech, with all of its pros and cons.

Meanwhile, both Toshiba and WD plan to transition to HAMR in the coming years, though before that, they plan to perfect their HDD platforms and push their existing recording technologies to their absolute limits. Once everyone adopts heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology that uses platters made of glass with granular FePt magnetic alloy, the development of their roadmaps will be more or less consistent and introduce HDDs with a circa 100TB capacity by around 2030 – 2031, though some roadmap slides are more optimistic, whereas others are more cautious.

Seagate: All-in on HAMR

All HDD makers tend to experiment with various recording technologies, platters, and heads. Just like others, Seagate has experimented with all kinds of EAMR methods, including microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAMR), but publicly it bet everything on HAMR as the most capable one.

Before Seagate finally shipped its Mozaic 3+ Exos HDDs in Q1 2024, it spent over a decade evolving HAMR from lab demonstrations (FePt + laser writing) through prototype drives and hyperscaler trials. Starting from around 2016, the company repeatedly said 'next year' for high-volume HAMR-based HDD production, only to roll out the same statement the year after.

Between 2020 and 2023, Seagate's HAMR rollout ran into a series of well-known hiccups that repeatedly pushed back commercialization despite earlier aggressive timelines. The company had originally targeted volume shipments of 20TB HAMR drives around 2020, but persistent issues, such as near-field transducer (NFT) reliability, iron platinum (FePt) media durability under repeated heating, and manufacturing yield, slowed progress. These challenges made HAMR technically viable but difficult to produce at scale, which led to multiple delays and extended customer qualification cycles.

To solve these challenges, Seagate had to develop its 2^nd Generation HAMR platform, which it eventually named Mozaic 3+, which went into high-volume production in 2024. But now that Seagate has mastered everything that accompanies HAMR, it can introduce new capacity points, qualify them, and ramp up production of new HAMR-based HDDs fairly quickly. For example, the company is now shipping its 44TB Mozaic 4-based drives to select clients and plans to expand availability in 2027. Meanwhile, Seagate intends to start qualification shipments of 50TB HDDs featuring the next-generation Mozaic 5 platform in late 2027.

Following 50TB HDDs in 2028, 60 TB HDDs by 2029 – 2030, and plans for 80+ TB drives in 2031. With ~100TB HDDs, Seagate intends to adopt high-anisotropic ordered granular FePt (FePt L1₀ phase) magnetic alloy, which will give it a further boost to set new areal density records and ultimately produce HDDs with capacities beyond 100TB.

Toshiba: Stretching MAMR (almost) to the limit

Toshiba is the smallest of all HDD makers, so it has a very calculated strategy that is designed to address parts of the market that are not served by its rivals and to derisk everything as much as possible.

To that end, Toshiba's HDD roadmap is built around a conservative, step-by-step scaling strategy focused on flux-controlled microwave-assisted magnetic recording (FC-MAMR) with some HAMR-based HDDs due in 2026 – 2027 being test vehicles, rather than high-volume products. The company's roadmap no longer lists microwave assisted switching microwave-assisted magnetic recording (MAS-MAMR) it envisioned as an intermediate step between FC-MAMR and HAMR a few years ago.

For now, Toshiba has its M12-series 28TB FC-MAMR-based 11-platter drive with conventional magnetic recording (CMR) and is sampling shingled FC-MAMR HDDs based on the same platform with 30TB – 34 TB capacities. The new M12 hard drives rely on glass platters, but with traditional cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy, which once again highlights Toshiba's step-by-step approach to adopting new technologies.

Looking forward, Toshiba's roadmap scales capacity primarily through more platters (up to 12), and continued FC-MAMR improvements targeting ~40TB drives around 2027. While the company intends to launch HAMR-based HDDs too, the 40TB capacity point will likely be limited to drives for select customers rather than true workhorses. More capacious HAMR-based HDDs are due late this decade.

In essence, Toshiba is taking a lower-risk, hybrid path: maximize MAMR and mechanical scaling first, then transition to HAMR only when necessary for the next major density jump.

Western Digital: Coexisting ePMR and HAMR

After abandoning MAMR technology in 2017 and having concentrated on energy-assisted perpendicular magnetic recording (ePMR) since then, WD expects its ePMR and ePMR 2-based hard drives to co-exist with HAMR for years to come. Furthermore, as ePMR and HAMR HDDs are very different, this means that the company isn't pursuing a dual-track, like Toshiba, but a multi-track roadmap aimed at maximizing yields and derisking all the technology transitions.

This year, the company's flagship 40TB offerings will rely on ePMR with SMR technology and feature 11 aluminum platters with cobalt platinum (CoCrPt) magnetic alloy. To squeeze in 11 aluminum disks and avoid using glass platters, WD had to squeeze the internal mechanics of the drive.

At the same time, Western Digital plans to start the transition to HAMR, with the first commercial 40TB and 44TB HAMR drives entering volume production around 2027, following hyperscaler qualification. Since WD's HAMR drives use edge-emitting lasers to briefly heat the iron-platinum (FePt) layer on the platters to its Curie point — where its magnetic characteristics shift — and temporarily lower coercivity to write the data, the HDD platters must be made of glass (or glass ceramic, though this will be used sometimes next decade), not aluminum, as it may degrade or deform over time. However, based on a comment made by the chief executive of Hoya, the only glass substrate maker for HDD platters in the world, it does not look like WD plans to use glass platters in high volumes for at least a couple of years, which in turn suggests a relatively slow production ramp.

"Starting in the latter half of FY2026 [which begins on October 1, 2026], shipments [of glass substrates] to the second customer will begin in addition to our current primary customer," said Eiichiro Ikeda, chief executive of Hoya. "We expect volume to increase substantially in FY2027 [April 1, 2027]. Equipment arrangements for FY2027, specifically for the second customer, have already been decided. Regarding volume beyond FY2028 [April 1, 2028], we are currently analyzing the situation, taking into account not only the increase from the second customer but also the movements of a potential third customer. Capital expenditures will be determined based on that schedule."

Seagate seems to be the primary producer of HDD platters based on glass substrates for its HAMR HDDs, Resonac (former Showa Denko) is catching up with its glass platters for Toshiba (and Seagate), whereas WD is the world's third maker of HDD media that is about to start using glass substrates.

WD expects to use both ePMR + SMR and HAMR technologies till at least 60TB capacity sometimes in 2028 or 2029, though it looks like proven ePMR + SMR will prevail in its shipments in the coming years. Yet, looking further out, WD's roadmap becomes aggressively HAMR-driven after 60TB: capacities are expected to scale to ~100TB in 2029 – 2030, enabled by higher areal density and drive architecture that supports up to 14 platters.

In short, Western Digital's strategy is a bridge-and-accelerate model — extend ePMR as far as possible, then rapidly scale with HAMR once the transition is justified. Beyond that, the company is targeting 140TB+ drives in the 2030s, which will require a transition to even more advanced media concepts, such as ordered granular and bit-patterned media, once HAMR on granular media reaches its limits.

Beyond capacity: High-performance and energy-efficient HDDs

In addition to increasing the capacities of their hard drives, Seagate and WD intend to increase the bandwidth and I/O performance of HDDs.

Seagate has offered its Mach.2-series hard drives with two actuators that double the per-TB IOPS performance of its drives, which is important for many clients that need to maintain their quality-of-service (QoS) specification, something that is getting increasingly hard to do amid growing storage density. Going forward, Seagate intends to increase the number of actuators, though the company expects to reveal its multi-actuator HDD roadmap in late May, when the company has an event for analysts and investors.

WD plans to split its HDD lineup into High-Performance drives (High-Bandwidth and Dual Pivot) and Power-Optimized drives, each tailored for different data center workloads. High-performance HDDs aim to increase bandwidth and/or I/O performance of a single drive with a roadmap towards 8× bandwidth and 4× I/O scaling.

Among the methods used to increase performance are using more than one head to read or write data at the same time, installing another fully independent actuator on a separate pivot that has its own set of heads, and therefore acting like another HDD. Dual-Pivot HDDs are currently in the lab and are targeted to become available in 2028.

In contrast, Power-Optimized drives target 'active cold' storage tiers, where data must remain accessible but does not require high performance. These drives reduce random I/O activity and are engineered to cut power consumption by roughly 20% to lower operating costs in large-scale deployments while offering predictable performance. Such HDDs will be positioned against 3D QLC SSDs starting in 2027. WDl expects these drives to be used to store massive datasets — such as AI logs and checkpoints — at a lower total cost of ownership.

Summary

The HDD market has shrunk from over 200 drive makers in the 1980s to just three in 2026. These three companies — Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital — tend to compete on capacity and performance, but they tend to do so using a completely different set of technologies, even despite the fact that they use some industry-standard components (HDD platter substrates, motors, etc.).

On the technology front, Seagate is all-in on HAMR; the company is already shipping 44TB drives and targeting 100TB-class products in the early 2030s. By contrast, Toshiba is taking a cautious, step-by-step approach, stretching MAMR and mechanical scaling before introducing HAMR later this decade. Western Digital is arguably the most cautious of the HDD makers, pursuing a multi-track strategy, which includes extending ePMR to 60TB, increasing the number of platters per drive to 14, all while gradually ramping production of HAMR-based HDDs, and targeting to launch 100TB+ drives around 2030.

Beyond capacity, both Seagate and Western Digital are also rethinking HDD performance with multi-actuator and dual-pivot designs to boost bandwidth and I/O performance to make HDD-based storage systems more competitive with SSD-powered systems. In addition, WD is also developing power-optimized drives to cut energy use for 'active cold' storage.

In general, 70 years after inception, the HDD industry is alive and kicking. Three companies are competing intensely to achieve higher storage density, higher efficiency, and predictable performance while retaining competitive per-TB cost compared to solid-state drives.

Inland remains a reliable partner in this volatile SSD environment, offering decent drives with good warranties at competitive prices. The QN450, a drive by its designation, which should be relegated to secondary storage, surprises. Going by its specifications, it looks like yet another cheap SSD to lure in budget shoppers, but, in fact, under this misleading varnish is an excellent drive that would otherwise escape notice. This is one to keep on your buy lists.

The surprises are quick and meaningful. Performance across the board, even with sustained writes, is very good. The drive also delivers very high power efficiency, which is crucial for a drive that will end up in laptops or the PS5. It’s also affordable, which makes sense given its market positioning – it is meant to be a Kingston NV3 killer, the drive you reach for when you just need something to complete your build – but it frankly performs closer to the high side of the stack. For the price, that’s hard to beat.

The downsides? Given the specifications and positioning, we would have to expect variable hardware builds over the life of the product, which means the underlying components can change. You might get what we did, or you might get something worse. We highly recommend checking your drive when you get it. This unfortunately requires some research on your part, but that’s standard for the industry at this point. More directly, the QN450 has a relatively low write endurance rating (TBW) for its class. This could suggest that it is meant to use QLC flash even though our sample had high-performance TLC. Some caution is therefore warranted, although we would say that, given the pricing at the time of review, this drive would compete favorably against QLC-based drives in its segment.

Inland QN450 Specifications

The Inland QN450 is available in four capacities: 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. With modern drives, you usually want a larger drive for the best performance, but it doesn’t seem too critical here. 1TB and up is good enough. The drive is priced at $94.99, $169.99, $289.99, and $449.99. Are these prices good? Hmm, they’re okay. The Biwin Black Opal NV7400 is often the better deal, and the Biwin NV7200 can also be a good choice. At least at 1TB and 2TB. At 4TB, the QN450 is more compelling with the current price, as it basically beats everything.

The drive’s not fast, though. At least not on paper. It reaches a maximum of 5,000 / 4,200 MB/s for sequential reads and writes and 600K / 800K random read and write IOPS. Only at 4TB, though. The performance specifications at lower capacities are worse. Then again, we’re not sure how seriously you can take those numbers. Inland reports the drive as having the Realtek RTS5772 – which isn’t great – and the Phison E21T for controller options. However, our sample has the Silicon Motion SM2268XT2. This controller is extremely capable, and the flash drive it uses is also pretty good. This makes the performance specs seem kind of conservative, to say the least.

Inland stands out with a six-year warranty, one year more than the usual, but only 300TB of writes per TB capacity. This is plenty for a budget, QLC-based SSD, but our sample has TLC flash. This makes us wonder if this is an “NV3 effect” where we can’t be 100% sure what hardware the drive will deliver. Either way, this level of write endurance is very weak for TLC flash. However, our analysis of the hardware indicates that the quality is not of a lower grade at all. We have to believe the TBW is this low to accommodate the potential use of QLC flash, which is completely what we expected from a “QN” drive in the first place.

Inland QN450 Software and Accessories

One big downside of Inland SSDs is the total lack of software support. We recommend MultiDrive if you’re looking for a modern data backup system, but Clonezilla is more widely supported and is bootable. We recommend CrystalDiskInfo for general drive health checking.

Inland QN450: A Closer Look

A simple, understated, single-sided drive. The lettering on the PCB indicates this is using the Silicon Motion SM2268XT2 controller with BGA308 form factor flash – times two – in the M.2 2280 form factor. No frills, which we actually like.

Controller confirmed, two NAND flash packages confirmed. SMI’s SM2268XT2 is a four-channel, DRAM-less SSD controller that can compete with the likes of Phison’s E27T and Maxio’s MAP1602. Those two are excellent controllers that can get hit over 7 GB/s with the right flash. The SM2268XT2 is no different, but it’s often seen leaning more budget than its peers. The Biwin M350 is a good example, as is the Kingston NV3. We found in our M350 review that the hardware, as specified, is selling itself short – it can bring some decent performance numbers.

We expect the QN450 to be no different, as 5 GB/s with this controller and flash is simply significantly below what the hardware can do. Often, hardware will be undersold like this so that you can have hardware swaps down the line – that is, different controllers and flash that can meet a basic spec. That might very well be the case here, as Inland lists the drive as using the Realtek RTS5772DL – a passable but not very good controller – and the Phison E21T, which is good but older. In fact, the main reason to use the SM2268XT2 would be to pair it with faster flash like the 232-Layer Micron TLC that we have here. So, yes, hardware swapping remains open given what Inland lists, but a manufacturer could also run the drive slower with better hardware for other reasons, such as extending the lifespan of weaker flash. However, we discovered nothing to suggest that is the case here; in fact, the configuration of this flash is quite performant with good endurance.

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Comparison Products

The Inland QN450 is in an interesting spot, ostensibly competing with products like the Kingston NV3 – a budget drive with variable hardware – in an increasingly difficult market. The QN450’s specifications are fairly paltry, but this might be the case to allow for hardware swapping to stay competitive. Our sample has very good hardware as it turns out, and as a result, the drive punches above its expected weight. It performs closer to fuller-performance drives like the TeamGroup MP44 and the QN450’s Inland stablemate, the Inland TN470. More common head-to-head competitors in its price range are the Biwin NV7200 and the TeamGroup MP44Q, which form a good baseline for performance expectations if this drive ends up with QLC flash. At the very top of this category are the Crucial P310, although this is no longer easy to find in its 2280 form factor, and the SanDisk WD Blue SN5100, two drives that redefined what a QLC drive can do.

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 QN450 scores excellently in 3DMark, coming in near the top with 41µs latency. Anything at or under 45µs is good in our book. It matches the TN470 almost exactly in this test which, considering the TN470 is the higher SKU – “T” over “Q” and 470 over 450 – is good news. It would make an excellent gaming drive.

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.

Much of what you do on your PC is bursty in nature. You load an application, then it sits idle in the background for long periods of time. Context switching can often be pulled from cached RAM. So you only really notice the initial load time when judging the feel, and even relatively low-end SSDs are plenty fast enough to often not be the perceptible bottleneck. Digging into heavy apps for content creation can be a different story, but that’s mostly with fuller drives and sustained workloads, especially writes. If you’re not doing that, then the QN450 looks pretty darn good here.

Would it hold up under heavier usage? Most likely, yes, especially after our look at sustained write performance, but this is not the drive an enthusiast would be picking for such workloads. For everyday OS and application use, this drive is amazing and all that you need.

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 QN450 is also an excellent drive for the PS5. This console doesn’t need a whole lot, but having a drive that delivers a consistent experience can be important. The QN450’s hardware is pretty much perfect for this. It’s not using an older controller or older flash like many budget options. Those can be slower in some circumstances and less reliable in general. Is this the fastest option? No, but it’s fast enough, and you can install it and not worry about missing out.

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.

Transfer performance is weaker but this is not unexpected. The QN450 is not rated for full PCIe 4.0 bandwidth which limits its peak copy rate. It’s still pretty fast and it beats the NV3, which is probably all we need to say about it. It’s NV3-positioned but has lower specs, yet it beats it in a bandwidth-driven test. This is a good secondary drive, plain and simple.

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.

A drive with low sequential specifications is usually going to suffer in ATTO. It comes as no surprise that the QN450 does. We’re most concerned with the drop in read performance at some popular block sizes – 128KiB specifically – but for the most part, this is not a dealbreaker. It still matches or beats the NV3 in QD1 sequential reads and writes in CrystalDiskMark. That’s its target competitor, and QD1 reads in particular can be indicative of real-world performance. That said, its relatively low read score means it’s not able to stand up against high-end drives like the MP44. The good news is, the drive has fantastic random read latency, which probably makes up for all of this. It’s going to feel very responsive for most things to the point that its potentially slower transfers aren't going to make it feel like you gave something up by going with a budget drive.

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 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.

Drives will usually have three distinct states when handling writes, although it would be more accurate to say that a drive’s response is determined by three different aspects of handling writes. Modern drives can shift flash from its native three- or four-bit mode to a single-bit, pSLC mode, or cache, to achieve very high write speeds. Because space is more limited in that mode and the writes are faster, the cache can quickly run out. The drive can then write to its much slower native mode, but it’s unable to fully keep up with writes because it has to free up space in the background by copying already-written data over. If this is the primary bottleneck, the drive becomes even slower, and performance can suffer greatly due to higher latency. For our testing, we would refer to these larger states as pSLC caching, native flash writing, and folding. The reason we say “aspects” above is that these states are not exclusive – a drive can and will shift between states, for example, jumping back up to pSLC speeds in the latter two modes. It’s just easier to visualize as three distinct states.

For the first state, the QN450 writes at over 6.3 GB/s for over 47 seconds. The cache is approximately 300GB, which is impossible with QLC flash – this would be over 1200GB of native flash – but well within the means for 3-bit TLC. There is, in fact, enough native flash left over to keep this drive from hitting a wall. It can achieve around 940 MB/s in the direct-to-TLC mode before eventually settling into folding at ~630 MB/s. This is a pretty good result for a drive in this class with such a large cache. Performance is pretty steady on the whole, actually. It would not be our first choice for a workhorse drive, especially with the relatively low TBW, but it can definitely beat QLC-based drives.

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

Looking for an efficient drive for your laptop? Look no further. The QN450 is exceptional with minimal power draw. It’s the most efficient drive on the list and one of the most efficient drives we’ve ever tested. It’s more than 10% more efficient than the next crop of drives like the MP44 and MP44Q. Being up there with the Blue SN5100 is honestly impressive. The drive also runs cool with more than 20°C of headroom in our testing and almost 30°C clearance for the recommended range, so it should be fine without a heatsink in almost all cases.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

Inland QN450 Bottom Line

The Inland QN450 is a pretty good drive, with an asterisk. We have concerns about the hardware. Micro Center lists two different controllers in a different class, and the specifications everywhere, including Amazon, suggest weaker hardware than what our sample has. The drive seems poised to be a Kingston NV3 killer – as a budget drive below the higher-end TN470 – but frankly, it’s too good for that. Given the drive’s relatively low TBW endurance rating, we have to anticipate potential hardware variability, meaning the hardware components used will change over its lifetime, which means our recommendation for it comes with a caveat.

Beyond that, though, performance is good to great across the board, and power efficiency is simply exceptional. This is a drive that will work great anywhere. At the time of review, it’s also priced pretty well, which in the current market is worth noticing. Inland does not have as much support as other, bigger brands, but we don’t find this to be much of an issue, as it’s still a known entity with a relatively good track record. Your biggest problem will be being able to afford an SSD at all with current prices. The QN450 is worth a look as a cost-effective alternative to some of the bigger names, and we can recommend it.

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In a world of rapidly developing artificial intelligence, the supply of computer hardware can barely meet demand, and at this point, long-term supply agreements (LTAs) become compulsory. When it comes to storage — both hard disk drives and solid-state drives — LTAs now span from three to five years, depending on the device. While some may argue that now all the supply will get to large customers, such agreements with guaranteed offtake may actually be good for consumers.

Up to five year LTAs

When it comes to SSDs, long-term supply agreements now span five years, according to Sandisk.

"The duration of this agreement varies, with the longest contract extending to five years," said Luis Visoso, chief financial officer of SanDisk, in an earnings call with analysts and investors. "In aggregate, volume commitments increased during the life of the contracts with quarterly commitments and a combination of fixed and variable pricing. […] These agreements are tailored to meet the needs of our customers and, in aggregate, provide us with demand certainty at financials that we expect will be consistent with our fiscal fourth quarter guidance."

Something similar applies to hard drives, though LTA visibility of Seagate and Western Digital is a bit shorter. In the case of Seagate, the company is even talking about bespoke storage systems.

"We have exabyte-scale supply agreements in place with nearly all major cloud and hyperscale customers, with nearline capacity almost fully allocated through calendar 2027," said William Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, in the company's most recent conference call. "At the same time, we are finalizing build-to-order contracts with these customers through the end of fiscal 2027, which defines specific configuration and pricing. Our value-based pricing approach enables customers to plan with confidence while contributing to sustained profit growth for Seagate, and we are actively engaged in strategic planning discussions now reaching into calendar 2028 and beyond."

The same applies to Western Digital. "Our long-term visibility continues to improve, with the duration of our agreements now extending into calendar year 2028 and calendar year 2029," said Irving Tan, chief executive of Western Digital.

Clear visibility

For years, storage has been considered a commodity, so now these long-term supply agreements give storage makers unusually clear visibility into real demand, which enables them to scale production in a far more disciplined way. SanDisk, Seagate, and Western Digital can now align NAND wafer starts, HDDs, HDD media output, and controller supply with multi-year volume commitments instead of reacting to short-term market demand. On the one hand, this reduces the risk of overbuilding capacity; on the other hand, it may ensure a lack of underinvesting ahead of demand increases.

With guaranteed demand secured using multi-year contracts, the aforementioned three companies are also more willing to commit billions of dollars to the expansion of fabs, assembly lines, and next-generation technologies such as higher-layer NAND and heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). What is even more important, these investments are aimed at confirmed demand rather than speculative forecasts, which in turn enables these companies to look beyond guaranteed demand, which in turn means speculative forecasts on the consumer market. Whether or not they are going to do that remains to be seen.

That being said, expansion remains inherently gradual. New 3D NAND memory capacity —like any semiconductor fab — usually takes years to ramp, and HDD advancements depend on incremental media and read/write head production increases usually at third parties like Hoya, Resonac (former Showa Denko), and TDK, which means supply will tighten before new capacity fully materializes.

To sum up, while a clear visibility of demand gives Sandisk, Seagate, and Western Digital more ability to spend, we have yet to see how everything works out.

Update 5/4/2026 11:25am PT: Added comment from Temu spokesperson.

A Reddit user who gambled a mere $20 on a 4TB external HDD from Temu has revealed, to the surprise of absolutely no one, that the drive was actually a scam, showing that it contained nothing but innards of a microSD card reader with a generic memory card attached to it. According to the post on the subreddit r/pcmasterrace, they decided to risk purchasing the item off the marketplace because it only cost $20. By comparison, the 4TB variant of the WD My Passport external hard drive costs around $165. The SSD version, one of our best external SSDs, costs $719.99 on Amazon. It’s obvious that the item is fake, but since the absolute dollar value is minimal for the user, they decided to gamble on it.

"Temu requires sellers to ensure their products match their listings accurately and removes listings that do not meet platform standards. Buyers who receive items that do not match their description are eligible for a full refund under the Purchase Protection Program," a Temu spokesperson tells us.

I got a 4TB external drive off Temu and this is what they sent lmao from r/pcmasterrace

In fact, the scam was so obvious that Temu refunded the purchase "suspiciously easily." Instead of finding a 2.5-inch SATA drive inside its plastic casing, all they found was a microSD card reader hot-glued to the back. It’s unclear if they attached it to their PC to see if it reported and delivered the claimed 4TB capacity. This is unlikely, though, because the highest capacity microSD card readily available on Amazon is only 2TB and costs at least $289.99.

Even then, some scammers tamper with the storage firmware to make it show a larger capacity than what’s available. One reliable way of finding this out is through testing software like the H2testw utility or by filling up the drive with your files, only to discover that your data has overwritten itself because of the lack of space.

Fake drives have been around for so long, but it’s proliferating even more now because the AI-driven chip shortage is causing both SSDs and HDDs to skyrocket in price. This fake drive is easy to spot, as it probably feels lighter when compared to a real hard drive, but some dupes do a good job in copying the look of the original, and you’ll only discover that it’s not what it says it is when you plug it into your PC. Even then, some knockoffs offer performance close to what you’d expect, so much so that you’d only know it’s a fake if you know what you’re looking for.

Temu is known for selling cheap knockoffs; that’s why many Reddit users do not recommend purchasing storage drives and other sensitive electronics off the website. Nevertheless, it does come through sometimes, like this user who received a free RTX 3060 GPU, although they’re yet to see if they really hit the jackpot.

A Kingston NV3-killer from Biwin? This once lesser-known brand continues to surprise, delivering a drive that punches above its weight. The M350’s competitive hardware makes for a compelling QLC-based budget SSD without making heavy compromises. The market may again be flooded by entry-level PCIe 4.0 drives, and the M350 stands out by balancing high power efficiency with good random read performance. It’s a particularly solid candidate for laptop upgrades and secondary storage, but it could serve you well anywhere in a pinch.

Biwin M350 Specifications

The Biwin M350 has a good capacity range, including 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB, but the 500GB is difficult to find, and the rest of the drive’s specifications feel a little antiquated. The drive is rated for up to 6,000 / 5,000 MB/s for sequential reads and writes, but only at 4TB. The lower capacities are significantly slower. As for random reads and writes, the drive can hit up to 400K / 800K IOPS, again at 4TB. Random write IOPS fall for the lower capacities. This isn’t a flagship drive, and the random reads in particular seem oddly measured.

Biwin does give the drive a five-year warranty, which is nice, and 400TBW per TB capacity. This is perfectly in line with a drive using QLC flash at around two-thirds of what you get with TLC drives. This is plenty of writes for most people.

Biwin M350 Software and Accessories

Biwin has two applications available for download for this drive. The first is Biwin Intelligence which is the company’s all-in-one SSD toolboxes. Such applications are used to receive basic information about your system and drives, help with firmware updates and with other features like secure erase and data backup, provide diagnostic data, and more.

The other program is the Biwin Data Recovery Tool which appears to be newer. Data recovery for SSDs – or memory cards, for that matter – is quite difficult if data is erased. Modern drives will quickly reclaim space for future writes if given the chance. Does this mean the tool is useless? No, as it is possible to recover data if you’re quick and there are situations where you might need it. However, we recommend having backups at all times.

Biwin M350: A Closer Look

The Biwin M350 is a single-sided drive at all capacities. This makes it an easier choice for laptops and other devices that prefer or may need a thinner drive. The drive is rated for 3.3V / 2.0A, or 6.6 watts, but we know a drive at this performance level with this hardware is not going to pull anywhere near that. In fact, this one should be an excellent choice for mobile devices, which include laptops. That’s one advantage of under-gunning the hardware – this controller and flash can hit higher numbers, for sure – but not the only one.

So let’s look at the hardware. Silicon Motion’s SM2268XT2 is a very capable four-channel, DRAM-less controller, able to match anything else on the market in this class. This includes the Phison E27T and super-popular Maxio MAP1602. It can hit up to 7,400 MB/s for sequential reads and up to 1,200K random read and write IOPS. So what gives with the specifications here? The M350 is rated more modestly, kind of like the Kingston NV3, which shares the controller. Yes, the controller won’t be as fast with some flash memory, but both drives deliberately aim lower on the specifications. One reason is that this allows for hardware swapping later with less worry about meeting the rated speeds. Another reason is that you can run the drive at a slower speed to preserve endurance and potentially improve power efficiency.

Which is it here? Well, let’s talk first about the flash. This is not one we’ve seen before, and you probably won’t be able to dig anything up with a standard Google search. However, it’s clearly using Micron coding – the “29” is a dead giveaway – and therefore we can use Micron decoding for the rest of the string. To save everybody some time, this is 232-Layer Micron QLC flash or N58R. This is good as far as flash goes, and Biwin has proven it can work with Micron flash, so no problems here. It is likely this drive is targeting budget users, and at these speeds, it will be efficient and should have no trouble hitting its endurance target. So, a good all-around drive in terms of hardware if you want to save some money.

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Comparison Products

The Biwin M350 lands in a crowded mainstream consumer SSD marketplace. Older drives are lingering on for longer periods of time and newer drives at lower performance tiers are appearing more often. This includes the new Teamgroup NV5000 as well as the venerable Teamgroup MP44L and Silicon Power UD90. The Netac NV7000 also falls into the entry-level category, which is defined by drives in the ~5 GB/s range. A step up from there is the Kingston NV3, which fills the gap between these and higher-end drives. The NV3 is, in fact, a capable drive, but because it can use a range of hardware its specifications are more restrained. The M350 is, at least superficially, an NV3-killer.

Faster but more direct M350 competitors include the Biwin NV7200 and the WD Blue SN5000, which form a good baseline for performance expectations in the drive’s price range. At the very top of these largely QLC-based drives is the Crucial P310, which consistently leads in benchmarks and remains the drive to beat among mainstream offerings. We have to make it clear that some drives have switched hardware since we first tested them, the UD90 being a good example with TLC flash at launch but QLC for many SKUs later, but that does not adversely impact the result in this case.

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 M350 manages to score 45µs in 3DMark latency, a respectable result in a category that usually reflects how fast a drive will load games on the whole. It’s clearly better than the ultra-budget NV5000 and even beats some popular budget favorites, ending up on par with the NV3. That’s exactly where Biwin wants this drive and it’s also a good result for a drive that might end up dedicated to game storage.

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 M350 impresses in PCMark, beating every drive here except the P310. This is an excellent result and shows that this hardware is surprisingly capable. It would certainly be fine as a primary drive in many systems – laptops, for instance – although we would caution against using it in a heavier system if you expect the drive to be very full. That said, it’s probably not much more vulnerable to that than other drives on this comparison list. If you’re on a budget, it will more than do.

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 M350 is also more than enough for the PS5. Its read bandwidth is a bit disappointing – even the NV3 is better – which could impact overall loading times, although generally only by a tiny amount. We’re talking fractions of a second. We think the M350 is fast enough for the console and is an acceptable pick if you’re trying to save money. This isn’t the drive for you if you are more into high-performance drives, even if generally such a drive isn’t required for the console. There is something to be said for the reliability of some higher-end drives, but in our experience Biwin has not had issues in that department.

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 drive’s copy performance is weak and that’s no surprise given its relatively low write transfer rate. It’s in the same ballpark of the other drives technically, all the way up to the NV7200, but its also-weak read transfer performance combines to bog down copying. This shouldn’t be an issue if it’s used as a secondary drive. If it’s the only drive in the system there are situations where this will make the drive feel less responsive than other options.

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.

While the M350 is pretty solid with writes in ATTO, its reads are more lamentable. It’s not as bad as the NV3 and NV5000, which are very good things because the NV3 is a direct competitor. However, it’s weaker than the other drives and struggles even at higher block sizes. This is where it begins to feel a little more like a last-gen drive. These results map to CDM as sequential writes are good there, but QD1 sequential reads are below average. Yes, it beats the NV5000, but that’s a low bar. We consider it good enough because it matches the NV3, but it doesn’t punch in the same class as other popular drives. QD1 sequential reads are associated with responsiveness, so this goes beyond benchmarks.

On the flip side, random reads are quite punchy on the M350. This probably makes up for the weaker sequential read performance to a significant degree. 43µs is exceptional and means the drive can give an excellent experience under ideal conditions. You will also probably notice this can reach 1,000K IOPS in our testing, as the controller is specified, but the drive is not. This discrepancy could hint at an open door for hardware changes in the future, or Biwin might just prefer being conservative. The drive will probably slow down with longer use, so that helps fend off unjustified warranty claims, at least.

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 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 can quickly see the weakness of the M350’s QLC flash when looking at the bigger picture. Performance starts fine at almost 5.94 GB/s in the fastest pSLC cache mode. The drive eventually runs out of cache and briefly writes straight to QLC at around 550 MB/s. Finally, the drive is forced to slow down and migrate data from the cache to the native QLC, a slow process that brings steady state write performance down to 273 MB/s. While this is slow, it’s about right for QLC. Folding often performs at roughly one-half the native speed, which is the case here. Native speeds for QLC pale in comparison to the peak pSLC cache speed.

This is a 2TB drive, so when converting 4-bit QLC to 1-bit pSLC, you have a cache size ceiling around 512GiB. After system reserved space, this will be less, for example 500GiB or 537GB. Bandwidth is usually given in GB/s, while storage on Windows would be in GiB, so we have to do some translation. Our write log shows around 530GB for the cache, which would not leave a lot of flash free. In fact, the drive only writes in direct QLC mode for a very brief period of time. Writing straight to QLC doesn’t require later folding but is more than an order of magnitude slower to write than pSLC. It can also increase drive wear.

It’s not atypical for QLC-based drives to have a cache that uses all of the drive’s flash. Outside of the cache, QLC in this case is about one-third the speed of equivalent-generation TLC flash. This combination means that once the drive actually runs out of cache, it must hit a folding state, which will often be one-sixth of comparable direct-to-TLC speeds. The folding state also increases latency, so the drive can feel worse in that situation, especially with non-sequential or mixed workloads. Bottom line, if you keep the drive away from that, it’ll be just fine, and you do have to hit the drive pretty hard to get it there.

Power Consumption and Temperature

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

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

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

The M350 is exceptionally efficient, which, as we mentioned previously, is a big selling point. This is a budget drive clearly aimed at laptops and other devices where you want to avoid thermal throttling and high power usage. The peak draw of 4.53W aligns perfectly with the max SMART power state of 4.50W. Sometimes budget drives won’t do as well in the power efficiency category – see our recent Seagate X1070 review for a good example – which, while fine, reduces the unit’s appeal. You can excuse away some niche performance issues on a laptop if the drive is running super cool.

The M350 exposes two temperatures, which we would say are essentially reported by the sensors for the flash memory and the controller. The latter tends to be more important when talking about heat and throttling. The M350 peaked at 63°C in our testing. We record this during a test that’s not necessarily realistic for the average user, but it gets the temperatures up to a reasonable peak. It’s possible to get drives hotter, but in general, our value is more grounded in reality.

Most drives today throttle around 85°C or so, and a good rule-of-thumb is to have 20°C or more of headroom for cooling without a heatsink in a laptop. The M350 hits this target. 10°C is a good target for desktop ranges, that is, with the assumption that some users will have worse cooling environments. The ambient can be adjusted for otherwise to some degree. We usually recommend a heatsink for the <20°C range to be on the safe side, but <10°C is a more critical situation unless you know you have good cooling.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

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

Biwin M350 Bottom Line

The Biwin M350 is actually a halfway decent drive. The manufacturer has been doing well lately, as we also like the NV7200 and NV7400. You might be asking yourself: what exactly is the difference between, say, the NV7200 and the M350? The model names are different for a reason – the X570 line is high-end, the NV line is mainstream, and the M series is entry-level/budget – but it’s still pretty weird to compare the two drives because at their heart they are very similar. Biwin’s specifications for the M350 are notably lower despite the fact that the drive can get into the NV7200’s range, which again makes us think it’s specified deliberately. We’ve mentioned before that this is done in cases where hardware might be swapped down the line, but it also helps with market segmentation. For the end user, this means you can probably get comparable hardware at a lower price, much as CPUs have sometimes been artificially binned. Having this knowledge is to your advantage as a buyer.

Fundamentally, there is nothing wrong with this drive aside from the fact that it uses QLC flash. Performance is good, efficiency is good, and even the endurance rating is not too bad. The rated speeds are disappointing, but, in real-world terms, don’t much matter for a drive in this class. This is Biwin’s NV3-killer, so its positioning makes sense. It also drives separation between the Maxio-powered NV7xxx drives as the M350’s SMI controller – the same one Kingston uses on its NV3 – has its own plusses and minuses. Frankly, SMI’s controllers are underutilized, and putting them into place for budget drives makes a lot of sense. From a manufacturer’s perspective, the working relationship is also different from one would have with, say, Phison. For you, the consumer, this means slightly better pricing relative to the hardware quality. At least in our opinion.

The M350 has the same complaints that we have for any other drive in this class. QLC flash has its weaknesses, and there is no DRAM. Biwin has decent support software, and the hardware seems good, though. Otherwise, the drive performs better than expected. It is honestly a pretty good choice in the current market. The choices made help us think Biwin is leaning more towards non-YMTC flash, which makes sense as it is trying to expand its position in memory markets.

I mean, let’s be honest, having an NV3 competitor is a pretty good idea given its sales, especially if that means having more flexibility on the hardware side of things. That said, Biwin does not have the reputation of hardware swaps that Kingston does, so the M350 is probably even better than it looks on paper. We recommend it for laptops, desktops, and the PS5, although a high-end system should look higher for a primary drive.

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Windrose, an early access PvE survival game made by Kraken Express, has come under scrutiny for consuming an abnormal amount of disk I/O during gameplay that will scare even the best SSDs. Multiple users have reported this issue in forum posts, and at least one YouTuber, Pixel Operative, has complained about it, revealing that the game can write up to 108 GB per hour to your SSD due to optimization issues in how it saves data. The new patch has substantially decreased the disk usage.

Players have discovered that the game will read from and write to storage virtually nonstop at speeds of around 15 MB/s to 30 MB/s, depending on the player’s location and in-game movement. According to footage Pixel Operative shared, disk usage will spike up to 30 MB/s constantly when the player’s character is running around a base. This behavior worsens when piloting a ship. The only times the game won’t constantly write to its host drive are when the character is standing still on land or moving around areas of the map that don’t exhibit high SSD load.

If we do the math, 30 MB/s comes down to around 108GB per hour. A four-hour gaming session would result in 432GB written. The excessive writing will not endanger modern TLC SSDs. However, QLC drives or older, worn-out drives are at higher risk.

Pixel Operative also compared the game’s storage workload against two other titles, Enshrouded and Valheim, showing that Windrose consumes significantly more SSD resources than these two games. In 60-90 seconds, Windrose read 32GB and wrote 1.3GB from the drive. By contrast, Enshrouded, within the same timespan, read 7GB and wrote 695MB to the drive, while Valheim read 1GB and wrote 5MB to the drive.

Other users on various subreddits and Steam forums also reported abnormalities, including instances where the game reached up to 100% disk utilization and in-game disk usage consumed up to 30GB per hour. However, it's important to highlight that 100% disk utilization typically indicates active time or queue saturation, so it does not necessarily imply high MB/s throughput.

The game’s significant storage demand appears to be by design, not the result of a random bug. A technical analysis by NewMaxx/BoreCraft traced the behavior to Windrose's RocksDB-backed save system. The game appears to run at least three RocksDB databases, with the Worlds database using 22 column families behind a shared 1 MB max_total_wal_size. That very small WAL budget can force frequent memtable flushes and compactions, turning modest gameplay state changes into much larger physical write traffic. The evidence points to durability-oriented persistence tuning rather than corruption, but the analysis does not prove whether the configuration was an intentional developer choice or an overly conservative/default setup.

Luckily, the Kraken Express quickly deployed a patch to fix the issue. In the latest Patch notes for version 0.10.0.4, the developer has reduced the disk usage during gameplay. According to Pixel Operative's new findings, the game writes at between 10 MB/s and 16 MB/s. When the character is standing still, the write speeds drop below 1 MB/s. It represents a 60% to 75% improvement compared to the previous version of the game.

If you're playing Windrose, make sure to update your game to the latest version. Your SSD will appreciate you for it. With skyrocketing prices for SSDs, you have to take extra care of your SSD, after all.

External 3.5-inch-based hard drives for backup and expanded storage have been common for decades (I brought one with me to college in 2000). But they typically required large laptop-style external power bricks, were often painfully slow, and were prone to random data-eating failure (ask me how I know). Seagate’s game-focused FireCuda X Vault drive (available in 8TB and 20TB options; we tested the 8TB) attempts to mitigate some of those past frustrations using a single USB-C connection that also powers the drive.

It’s also faster than portable hard drives (like the WD My Passport I tested in 2024), delivering a little under 200 MB/s writes in our real-world 50GB file transfer test. And if data loss concerns you, the FireCuda X Vault, like most Seagate drives, ships with two years of the company’s in-house Data Recovery Service. Of course, sub-200 MB/s speeds aren’t going to compete with even mid-range SSD these days, and at roughly 7.75x 2.1 x 5.25 inches and 2.75 pounds, it’s much larger than something like Sandisk’s solid-state Desk Drive (which I also tested at 8TB). But that 8TB desk-bound SSD is currently selling for $740, while Seagate’s 8TB spinning-platter Vault has an MSRP of $269. Is the Seagate Firecuda X Vault (which, apart from its built-in RGB, doesn’t look all that different from external 3.5-inch external drives I owned in the early 2000s) a smart storage option for gamers in 2026? Let’s walk through its features, put it through our external storage testing, and find out if it deserves a spot on our list of the best external hard drives and SSDs.

Specifications

Design and features of the Seagate FireCuda X Vault

The Seagate FireCuda X Vault looks and feels a lot like any other external 3.5-inch external drive, perhaps with a bit more gamer edginess, thanks to some plastic slats designed to look like cooling fins and a wrap-around top surface with some cutouts to let the RGB shine through. The entire outer shell is plastic, save for a large foam pad on the bottom that’s there to prevent the drive sliding around on your desk (and also to hide the access screws underneath). The drive doesn't exactly scream premium storage, but it doesn’t feel or look cheap, either.

The sole port, which is USB-C, is housed on the rear center. And because this is a bus-powered drive, you’ll need to use a port (and a cable) that’s capable of delivering 15W of power. That might mean plugging the drive into the back of your PC if you’re using a desktop. And considering most modern systems don’t have more than two or three native USB-C ports, you might have to pick up a powered USB-C hub if you have other peripherals that need those ports.

The drive ships with a 0.5-meter (1.64 feet) removable USB-C-to-USB-C cable.

Software on the Seagate FireCuda X Vault

Seagate is going hard on software trials with the FireCuda X Vault. A small pamphlet in the box gives you access to a 1-month trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and two months of Adobe’s Creative Cloud Pro. While these are, of course, designed to suck you into an ongoing service, it is roughly $100 worth of software access if you were to pay for it yourself.

The drive itself ships empty, save for a shortcut to an online registration page and a PDF of the drive’s warranty.

You can also grab Seagate’s Toolkit software, which provides simple but straightforward controls for backing up, mirroring folders, and granular controls of the RGB lighting on the top of the drive. I also appreciate that the drive was recognized by Windows Dynamic Lighting, which let me customize the RGB well before I downloaded Seagate’s Toolkit.

Comparison Products

We haven’t tested many external spinning-platter hard drives in recent years, save for WD’s 6TB portable hard drive (based around a much smaller 2.5-inch hard drive), which is also bus-powered but still uses the archaic USB 3 Micro-B port. But Seagate also sent along its also-new One Touch HDD (available in 8TB, 20TB, and 24TB models, for $10 less than the FireCuda X Vault and competing capacities) drive, which is a bit slimmer (and seen above, left) and also gets power and data over USB-C.

To round out our charts and see what you can get in other form factors, we’ve included Sandisk’s 8TB Desk Drive (which is almost 3x the price, but much faster). We also tossed in Samsung’s slow (for an SSD) T5 Evo drive, as well as a fast flash drive, Kingston’s 1TB DataTraveler Max.

The solid-state options are, for the most part, much faster, as well as generally a lot smaller. But thanks to AI-driven price hikes in the past several months, you’ll pay a whole lot more for 8TB of SSD storage – even though hard drives are also more expensive than they used to be. Generally, unless price really is no option these days, if you need 8TB of storage or more (especially from a single drive), you’re going to opt for a hard drive.

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.

Of course, the SanDisk desktop SSD and the Kingston flash drive beat the hard drives here (and in most tests). Seagate’s FireCuda drive manages to beat out the less-than-speedy Samsung T5 portable SSD, and WD’s smaller portable hard drive. But interestingly, it’s the Seagate One Touch that tops all the hard drives on this chart.

Transfer Rates – DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test real-world file transfer performance with a custom 50 GB dataset. We copy 4,617 files (images, videos, and software ISO files) to a folder on the test drive (write). Then, after leaving the system idle for five minutes, we run the same test in reverse, moving the test folder to a different location on our PCIe 4.0 testing drive.

In this real-world transfer test, Seagate’s FireCuda drive takes its expected spot atop the other hard drives in our test pool. But Samsung’s T5 is faster, as are the other solid-state drives here. Still, it’s good to see the FireCuda landing around the 200 MB/s read and write range, which is about what we would expect for a performance-focused consumer hard drive here in 2026.

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.

This sequential synthetic test is a sort of best-case test for SSDs, so you can see that those pricier-per-capacity drives are much faster here. But interestingly, we again see the Seagate FireCuda drive landing below its One Touch hard drive sibling on this test. Given the reverse was true (and there was a wider margin) in DiskBench above, it’s safe to say the FireCuda drive will be slightly faster in real-world file transfers, despite the numbers here.

Again, this synthetic small-file test sees the Seagate One Touch doing a little better than the FireCuda drive, but the two are effectively tied, especially when it comes to writes. One thing that’s clear from all these tests is that, while a smaller portable drive might be more convenient, the WD My Passport (with an internal 2.5-inch drive) is significantly slower than the newer, larger, Seagate drives (based around internal 3.5-inch drives).

Bottom Line

Seagate’s FireCuda X Vault is a bus-powered 3.5-inch drive, available in 8TB and 20TB options, aimed at gamers with some RGB lighting (which thankfully doesn’t require additional control software in Windows 11). It performs noticeably better than smaller portable hard drives we’ve tested, and is slightly faster than some other 3.5-inch alternatives.

Apart from the lighting and a trial of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, there isn’t much particularly gaming-specific about it. But if you’re looking for a place to store your streaming footage or a massive game library, it does the job while costing a lot less than a comparative spacious SSD. Its primary downside is also its primary convenience. One USB-C cable can power the drive while providing data access. That’s great for anyone who has dealt with external drive power bricks in the past. But how many USB-C ports do you have that are capable of delivering this drive’s 15W power requirements? If you plan to keep this drive plugged in, you might also need to invest in a capable dock or USB hub with power delivery and multiple USB-C ports.

Adding more storage to your PC can prove to be a difficult task if your GPU is covering the M.2 slots. And if they're already filled, adding an expansion card to an empty PCIe slot can be a bit tricky because your GPU could block that, too. JEYI, a popular accessories manufacturer from China, has a solution to this problem: a flat PCIe-to-M.2 adapter that sits completely flush with the motherboard.

Most AIC (add-in cards) take up perpendicular space inside the chassis because they stick out vertically from the motherboard. Modern graphics cards are often so large that they block even neighboring PCIe slots, making it impossible to add the adapter even if there's space otherwise. JEYI's flat adapter solves this by putting the M.2 slot parallel to the board, similar to an actual, native M.2 slot, so it doesn't protrude at all.

The adapter is called "ArcherX" and comes in two flavors: PCIe 4.0 x1 and PCIe 4.0 x4. Both are also backward compatible with PCIe 3.0, and the vendor teased a PCIe 5.0 adapter in the works as well. The card is made by soldering two PCBs together — on one side, you have the PCIe connector itself and, on the other, you have the M.2 slot. It has a long, thin bar sticking out with a screw mount at the end for full-size (2280) SSDs. Contrary to how it may look, the company says it's very rigid.

JEYI chose to keep the adapter as small as possible to ensure no surrounding componentry comes in the way. There's no price or availability yet, but considering PCIe to M.2 adapters are cheap, and JEYI produces budget-oriented accessories, we should see this drop around the $20-30 mark. If you want to see another useful PCIe adapter like this one, check out this platypus adapter that adds two M.2 slots.

It turns out that you can use a PCIe to CFexpress adapter that plugs into a PCIe slot on your motherboard to use Xbox Series X|S Storage Expansion Cards as local storage in your PC.

Despite largely identical specs under the hood, Microsoft and Sony took different approaches to external storage for their current-gen consoles. While the PS5 has a dedicated M.2 slot, the Xbox Series X|S is stuck with proprietary Storage Expansion Cards made by Seagate and Western Digital. Turns out, they're actually not completely inflexible after all, as u/Dramatic-Shape5574 on Reddit showed you can use cheap CFexpress adapters to make these cards work on a PC.

Using Xbox Series X/S expansion cards as PC Storage from r/xbox

This is not exactly groundbreaking news; it's been known for a while that these expansion cards use the CFexpress Type-B connector. The standard itself uses the NVMe protocol, but it's limited to a PCIe 3.0 x2 connection. Microsoft's custom version of it, however, supports PCIe 4.0 x2. Previously, someone even made an M.2 to CFexpress adapter that took a rare PCIe 4.0 x2 M.2 SSD and converted it into an expansion card for Xbox.

We're looking at the opposite situation here, turning an Xbox Expansion Card into regular storage for a PC. The OP used a PCIe to CFexpress adapter that plugs into a PCIe slot on your motherboard, giving you a female CFexpress slot in return. There are also M.2 to CFexpress adapters that connect to the M.2 slot instead of a PCIe slot, if that's more convenient for you. Just make sure to choose one that says "Type-B."

500 GB Xbox Expansion Card for $99 (Western Digital only)

1 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $189.99 (Seagate)

1 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $149.99 (Western Digital)

2 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $275.88 (Seagate)

2 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $249.99 (Western Digital)

4 TB Xbox Expansion Card for $549.99 (Seagate only)

There's only one caveat — you need to format the Expansion Card before it can be used inside Windows. It'll still be recognized, but the Xbox-specific file system won't work with any OS directly. After formatting, it's picked up as a normal SSD with read and write speeds of up to 1,117 MB/s and 1,570 MB/s, respectively. That's much slower than even entry-level PCIe 3.0 drives, but fast enough for general usage, nonetheless.

The ongoing component crisis caused by the AI boom has skyrocketed the prices of memory and storage, so if you happen to have an Xbox Expansion Card lying around, these CFexpress adapters can be the perfect stopgap. And if you want to get your hands on a new Expansion Card, you're in luck because a lot of the models are on sale. We've listed multiple options above for each storage capacity in case any deal runs out.

There's no difference between the Seagate and Western Digital models, but we noticed the WD SKUs were consistently cheaper than the Seagate ones. Both are certified by Xbox, so they have identical specs and performance. That means there shouldn't be a difference in their adapted performance on PC either. If any of the Amazon links above expire, you can check out the deals on Best Buy and Newegg.

A Reddit user took to the social media platform to complain about Toshiba, which, they said, refused to honor the warranty on a 20+ TB enterprise hard drive. The documents Tom’s Hardware examined indicate that Toshiba refused the warranty replacement on the grounds of no available stock and a possible wait time of one year for a replacement 24TB model.

According to the r/DataHoarder post, the company where the user worked bought several 20+ TB hard drives a couple of months ago for their storage array. When one of the drives failed, they returned it to Toshiba, only to be told that their only option was a refund at the original purchase price. The company didn’t offer to replace the broken hard drive with a new one from their stock, meaning they’ll have to purchase a new drive at a significantly higher price today.

This is definitely a disappointment for any buyer, especially in the corporate setting, as they don’t often base their purchase decisions solely on price. Instead, they consider reliability, longevity, and the manufacturer's guarantee of support. Refunding an item at its original purchase price makes sense for the company. However, most users feel that the least a PC manufacturer can do is replace it with the same component (or a similar one if it’s no longer available), even if it’s more expensive.

“I'm guessing they saw dollar signs from the AI bubble and sold off their safety stock or are seeing an unusually high failure rate in those drives,” 615wonky said on their post. “Both reasons to stay far away.”

Other manufacturers are also taking extreme measures as the AI-driven shortage of memory and storage chips is pummeling the PC market. Another Reddit user had an issue with the Silicon Power RAM they bought, being slapped with a 15% depreciation fee for returning defective RAM sticks. This wouldn’t have mattered much if the prices of memory modules stayed flat, but the fact that a pair of 8GB DDR5 RAM sticks now costs more than $200 (compared to less than $55 for pre-shortage prices) means that the money they received from the return isn’t enough for even one 8GB DDR5 memory module.

Minisforum has told Tom’s Hardware that its powerful AI NAS, the N5 Max, will launch on April 23, 2026. The firm describes this as a breakthrough device, and indeed its specs are pretty extreme for a consumer NAS, with an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 delivering 126 TOPS of AI compute power under the hood. It boasts 64GB LPDDR5X RAM, support for up to 200TB of storage, and comes with OpenClaw pre-installed on its 128GB system drive. We’ve also been given the full specs sheet (see below) and told the price for this tasty tech concoction. It will retail at $2,899.

The Minisforum N5 Max isn’t actually retail listed yet, but you should expect it to appear on the firm’s Amazon store on or around April 23, at that $2,899 sticker price.

Previously, we have reported on the overall product concept and key specs. It was already clear that this was a true Max member of the Minisforum N5 range, which also includes the N5 Pro with Ryzen AI 9 HX Pro 370 for $1,750, or $899 for barebones, and the N5 Air, based on an AMD Ryzen 7 255, which is $519 for barebones.

Minisforum expects users to wield this AMD Strix Halo power for “self-owned computing, privately controlled AI.” To help users get started box-fresh, it includes pre-integrated one-click deployment tools to enable full OpenClaw capabilities on the local platform. More specifically, the mini PC stalwart suggests using the N5 Max's power for “AI-powered semantic photo search… AI smart editing… [and] AI Agent OpenClaw” to work smartly on your behalf.

Enough of that AI waffle, though, let’s look at the cold, hard specs. The table below should let you know exactly what you are getting for your nearly $3,000.

Minisforum N5 Max specifications

Some of the key specs we have now that weren’t disclosed in the prior PR or official blogs include the supplied RAM and storage specs/quotas. In the era we live in now, these are sensitive stats.

You can see that the N5 Max, as priced, is configured with 64GB of LPDDR5X-8533 memory, which is non-expandable. On the plus side, that's pretty fast system RAM, which the powerful iGPU will appreciate.

Though you can expand this device to 200TB of lovely storage with 5x HDDs and 5x M.2 SSDs, you don’t get much to start with. Minisforum is shipping this device with a 128GB system disk, according to the spec sheet. That uses one of the five M.2 slots.

There is probably sufficient I/O for many users, including a pair of 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports (but no wireless/BT). We also note that there are 3x USB4 ports, two of which are USB4 v2 with up to 80 Gbps.

We’ve seen Strix Halo systems without the NAS functionality around the $3,000 level, so this price is tolerable given that context. Has Minisforum chosen specs well with its fixed 64GB memory and minimal starter storage, given its product marketing? Buyers will vote with their wallets.

About two weeks ago, Backblaze sent out an email to its subscribers letting them know about the latest changes to its Terms of Service, and therein lies a paragraph that says that if your usage of the service exceeds "typical usage patterns" or "places an undue burden," the company may throttle or terminate your account, this despite the company's pledge of unlimited backups. There is no definition of what constitutes typical usage, so your guess is as good as ours. The company has also stopped uploading local data synced to other cloud storage suppliers. The changes come as the company has experienced a 40X year-over-year increase in AI data stored on its servers and has increased focus on its accelerating AI business.

Backblaze is perhaps the most popular home computer backup service, offering unlimited storage for a low monthly price and a simplified interface that backs up entire computers and external drives in one fell swoop. That's the sales pitch on the website, except the exact definitions of "unlimited," "computers," and "external drives" are all up for discussion thanks to the company's repeated ToS changes and possibly its market repositioning — and can lead to instances of data loss, as some users found out the worst way.

The new data limit might be lower than most would think. Data posted in 2021 purportedly by Backblaze's then-CTO Brian Wilson shows that storing just 2 TB would put you in the top 1% of users. It's been 5 years on now, and that figure has certainly changed, but even 4 TB isn't that many bytes in the era of affordable 20 TB external drives. Predictably, tech-minded users do not appreciate the change, especially given a price hike to B2, the company's business-oriented cloud storage, which is sometimes recommended as an alternative.

Knowing that you might be kicked off a service is bad enough, but it doesn't impose any losses on you beyond inconvenience. However, roughly six months ago, Backblaze enacted a silent change that made its backup app stop uploading local data synced to "OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iDrive, and others."

The alteration was only published in the software's release notes, meaning that most everyone was unaware of it. Some users were caught by surprise by tangible data loss — quite the irony for a backup service, especially one that extolls the virtues of an actual backup versus a file sync in its own blog posts.

Developer Robert Reese found out about the changes in the worst way when he needed to recover data from his Git folders that had been silently added to Backblaze's file exclusions list. He then dug further and, along with other users, found that Backblaze never told anyone about its exclusions of file sync services or Git, and that it's hard to trust a backup service that can at any point unilaterally decide to stop backing up important data.

At face value, one might think that not backing up Dropbox, OneDrive, etc., is not a problem since you'll have copies of the files in those services, but then the difference between a sync and a backup rears its ugly head. First, most of those services only keep deleted data for 30 days, so if you only notice something is gone more than a month, you can't fetch it from Backblaze as expected.

Second, changes to files might fall into a similar trap, as most sync services have limits on age, number of versions, or both, particularly in the free tiers. Third, syncing files back to your PC might overwrite recent changes, and you won't be able to fetch the original copy.

Rubbing salt on the wound, although Backblaze is only meant to back up internal and external drives and not network shares, the client can trip you up in unexpected ways, as external encrypted drives are caught in the crossfire and likewise not backed up.

Other than "it's just business," all these changes might have to do with the fact that Backblaze apparently no longer sees home backups as a business priority. The homepage first and foremost touts cloud and AI storage, with the home backup service tucked away under two menu options.

Back in 2025, the company saw its backup revenue flatten as cloud storage grew and subsequently underwent a restructuring. The firm's latest quarterly results show that AI customers are making Backblaze a lot of money, so it's not hard to imagine the home backup service might be dropped altogether at some point.

The ongoing component shortage and mounting geopolitical uncertainty have created a tough time for the PC industry. Memory and NAND flash have been hardest hit in terms of price hikes, and the proliferation of counterfeit products only makes things worse for consumers. As reported by ComputerBase, a customer ("etoo") in Austria recently ordered two 1 TB Samsung 990 Pro SSDs, only to receive at least one fake drive that can't even be formatted.

Previously, we covered a similar story from Japan where a fake 990 Pro was benchmarked by a local outlet. That drive actually performed exceptionally well, but it seems like the dupes have now spread to Europe, too. The buyer placed an order with an Austrian retailer and received the box a few days later, as expected. The packaging was "deceptively real," carrying a seal and most of the same markings as the original.

But upon closer inspection, the copied text appeared to be lower resolution, but only when directly compared to the real box. It also lacked the hanging tab that has given away prior dupes. Getting inside leads to a dead giveaway, however, as this SSD features a blue PCB for some reason; the original is black. It's a conspicuous change if you know to look for it, but the stickers on the drive matched closely with the legit Samsung SSD.

When plugged in, the drive is detected inside Windows and tools like CrystalDiskInfo, but they strangely report a capacity of 1,099.5 GB, and the firmware version does not follow Samsung's naming convention. As such, the SSD is not picked up as a genuine product in Samsung's Magician software. It's recognized as "SSD 990" Pro but labeled "Non-Samsung," rendering all the diagnostics features and scans unavailable.

The fake 990 Pro couldn't be benchmarked either, because it couldn't even be formatted inside the operating system. This drive was a dud through and through, and it's clear that the bad actors didn't actually care about the scam beyond replicating the packaging. As insane as it sounds, we looked at another counterfeit 990 Pro that was slower than a USB 2.0 flash drive, but at least that drive technically worked.

ComputerBase says it has reached out to the Austrian vendor that supplied this clone, and the store is currently investigating the matter. The seller claimed no other fake drives have been brought to their attention, but the affected buyer also purchased a third 990 Pro that looks to have similar, altered packaging. The vendor has requested that they not open that one for the time being. Samsung has responded to the story already, with a quote recommending buyers to only purchase its products from certified retailers.

Most of the industry is focused on RAM and SSDs when it comes to the chip shortage that exploded in late 2025, but another storage segment is also being greatly affected by the lack of supply. According to a PCWorld investigation, USB drives and memory cards are showing massive price hikes from last year. In fact, we checked out several memory products on Amazon and compared their price histories on CamelCamelCamel and discovered that the median price increase across formats and capacities is a whopping 123%.

While these storage formats are often slower than SSDs, they still use NAND chips from wafers that could be manufactured from the same production lines, with their differences coming from binning and quality tiers. So, it would make sense for memory chip fabs to optimize their production lines for higher-bin NAND chips for SSDs. These drives are often used by AI data center customers who are willing to pay a premium to secure the storage they need. This optimization, in turn, could lead to a smaller supply of low-bin NAND chips for USB flash drive and memory card manufacturing, leading to higher costs for brands like SanDisk and Lexar, among others.

Because of this, manufacturers are increasingly turning towards more premium products to justify their prices. Just last week, SanDisk quietly released a 2TB variant of its top-tier Extreme Pro UHS-II SD card for $2,000, meaning this card would cost photographers, videographers, and other users $0.98 per GB. By comparison, the lower-tier 2TB SanDisk Extreme Pro UHS-I SDXC card only costs $440, or about $0.21 per GB. SanDisk isn’t the only company doing this, as other manufacturers like Lexar and Kingston both have premium memory cards that are in a similar price range.

Memory card manufacturers have no choice but to adapt to the current realities of the market. “Facing the shortage of supply, our strategy is to focus on high-end products instead of expanding our factories or manufacturing,” Lexar Senior Marketing Director Lincoln Lin said during a company-sponsored media trip. He also added, “We think this is what we should do in the current supply shortage situation. Because of the supply limitations, we have to release more high-value products and keep some differentiation for our consumers.”

The market response to increasing prices has also been interesting. Lexar EU General Manager Grace Su pointed out that the company has prepared lower-capacity and lower-performance drives to give buyers options. “This is a curiosity for me as buyers have in their mind, ‘I would like a 1TB [drive]. 1TB is the minimum capacity I want to have. Now that I can only afford 512GB, I can wait,’” Su said. While she said this in reference to consumers purchasing SSDs, it could also apply to those looking for memory cards who need a minimum capacity for their specific use-case.