abufrejoval What I find somewhat exasperating is that other penny pinching technical details are no longer mentioned or documented by the vendor. This drive in all likelyhood isn't just QLC, but also DRAM-less, so it will eat some of your host's RAM, precious enough as it is, to manage it's management data. Once those drives run out of their (unspecified size) SLC cache, they tend to crawl to speeds slower than spinning rust. And that is a bit of an issue, because it means that fitting more than 2 or 3 current games on the drive won't work, so you'll have to swap them regularly from your cache. Now I actually have a 10Gbit network and USB4 RealTek 10Gbit NICs are really cheap and available now, but all of that is for naught, when the NVMe drive bogs down to 50MB/s after a few seconds. So just today I upgraded such a 1TB Samsung OEM drive in a rather expensive €2000 laptop with a true and blue (black, actually) Samsung 990 Pro 2TB, I bought back in the good old days, when TLC and DRAM was still the norm and 2TB just a bit over €100… these days there is no telling what Samsung even puts into the 990 Pro drives… Peak performance is the same, but that old 990 Pro also sustains loads way better than the current penny pinching crap that only exploits the "990" name, without delivering the performance we might think we are buying. Best about the 990 Pro was that it was still pretty efficient, wouldn't drain your laptop's battery and let you pay in heat… good old times! Reply
abufrejoval JimmyDoogs said: Mmm. I bought an 8TB for $530 this time last year.. I missed the point where 8TB drives had linear pricing and capabilities (I think that only lasted a month or two in Summer 2025), so I mostly run dual WD Black 4TB SN850X on my workstations (plus one PCIe v5 4TB WD drive, another combo which only had a small blip in the consumer market last summer). I also have a nice stash of 2TB Samsung 970 Evo+, which are only PCIe v3, which I want to consolidate via a PCIe switch (e.g. four 970 Evo+ into one PCIe v5 x4). But those switch chips remain so expensive, it just doesn't make sense. That's so much easier with those Samsung 860 and 870 EVO (TLC) 2TB SATA SSDs, which form the core of my current 12TB Steam cache networked via 10Gbit Ethernet. While I missed the very top notes on price/performance for personal computing in Summer 2025, I count myself lucky at having enough of everything for now and only hope nothing fails: I couldn't afford to replace what I have… a very odd feeling in more than four decades of building my personal computers. Reply
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/samsungs-new-2tb-990-ssd-is-36-percent-off-at-amazon-nearly-usd200-off-this-gen-4-all-rounder#main
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