Get the SK Hynix Gold P31 for $146 [Prime Members Only] (was $208)
The SK Hynix P31, then. Let’s give you some details. This is a TLC drive, with a DRAM cache that means its sustained performance is excellent. The 2TB size means that you get a ton of space for your OS install, games and media, although at this reduced price you’re paying just 7 cents per gigabyte - pretty darn good. The NVMe connection is of the PCIe 3.0 spec, so faster PCIe 4.0 drives will offer better sequential speeds - but not necessarily better random performance, which is quite good here. The maximum read and write specs are 3500MB/s and 3200MB/s respectively, while random specs are 570K and 600K IOPS - around two thirds as fast as the very fastest PCIe 4.0 SSD drives like the WD SN850x and FireCuda 530. Overall, while those are some impressive specs, perhaps the most valid for some folks are the five-year warranty and 1200TBW longevity rating. Nice. The specs portion of this deals post is now complete, so I can stop bolding random words and annoying people. What I would say beyond this is that the drive’s excellent efficiency doesn’t preclude it being used in a desktop machine, where its speed are still competitive - and especially so for the price. You may not be familiar with the SK Hynix name unless you’re a specific type of nerd, but these folks are one of just a handful of companies that actually make the flash memory at the heart of RAM and SSDs - so they get the same competitive advantages of their similarly vertically-integrated counterparts, such as Samsung, Micron (makers of Crucial drives), Kioxia (formerly Toshiba), Western Digital and Intel. So - despite being relatively little known on account of only just having started creating consumer drives, these guys are legit!
