Hey all, been a while.

Wanted to just throw my .02 on this NVMe drive which I think is one of the best values in PC parts right now. I spent some time with a 1TB stick that ran $105. For reference that compares to around $350 for the top NVMe 1gb part (the 970 Pro).

First, every competent review correctly points out that there is a longevity trade off with the QLC nand tech it employs, which I won’t bore you with. It is accurate to say that the drive (like all SSDs) perform worse as you nearly fill them, but this is a worse offender. It’s also true that QLC will deteriorate faster than other band types over time, and also true that it’s not quite as fast. Even more, certain extreme workloads exposing the drive to heavy industrial or professional usage nonstop would be a bad idea.

However, in normal-moderate use cases, it just not enough to matter. To use an analogy, it’s like saying that a certain new budget car model is only expected to hold up for 250k miles, where other models might be averaging 400-800k miles. But if you’re putting 30k miles on it a year, how much does it matter?

I’d also point out that nobody in my circle of nerd can tell the difference between this drive and a 970 Pro without benchmarking. If you want to transfer 400GB worth of files all at once or something sure, but is that something you actually do a lot? Loading games, running music production software, Adobe apps etc it works just as well.

But more than all that, you’re looking at some pretty radical changes coming to storage in terms of tech, capacity and cost. If you’re that heavy a user what are the odds you’re going to be using the same drive (any drive) 5+ years at the pace of recent changes?

This is an insane time for people to get just great, great value on very fast/responsive PC performance if they understand and are realistic about their own use case situations & can put the drawbacks of some of the gear out there in context.

After messing with it I read and watched several reviews for more of the techie side, read forums, and I just think there needed to be more emphasis on everyday performance.

Also the SX8200 drive costs a little more and is maybe another option if you wanted a step up too.