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.
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.
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.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/ssds/inland-qn450-1tb-ssd-review#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- Intel's P-core Core 9 273PQE 'Bartlett Lake' CPU beats 14900K by up to 9% in gaming tests — embedded-only chip is unofficially Intel's fastest gaming CPU (at 72
- This must-have miniature Macintosh retro dock gives your M4 Mac Mini a 1980s makeover — equipped with a 5-inch HD display and M.2 NVMe SSD slot
- Trump administration considers mandatory pre-release vetting of AI models — Anthropic's Mythos cited as catalyst for policy reversal
- A suspected YouTube interface bug spikes RAM usage above 7 gigabytes, users report severe lag and frozen tabs — bug might be trapping browsers in an endless lay
- Popular 90s search engine ‘Ask Jeeves’ finally bites the dust — parent company shutters website that pioneered natural language queries, only a placeholder resu
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.