I think in many ways this drive got an unfair bad rap early on due to the price. One thing people forget is that most of an SSD’s performance on an end user’s system is tied to QD1 random read and write performance. And in that regard nothing else on the market even comes close to this. This drive is the first real progress I’ve seen in SSD tech since we started to get mainstream PCIe NVMe drives on the market. Perhaps more exciting is the fact that we now have an entirely new class of storage with huge potential going forward.
So aside from being an exciting new technology what does this drive buy you? Almost unlimited endurance, you’ll upgrade to something new before the memory cells on this expire and if you have a write heavy workload like I do it’s nice to have the peace of mind. It’s also great that there’s zero performance degradation over time and it performs just as well full as it does empty. Something many people forget about SSDs is that full ones can have awful performance characteristics especially if they rely on emulated SLC caches for writes as most newer TLC and now QLC SSDs do.
Further this thing is noticeably fast. There’s a noticeable speed up subjectively throughout Windows but more importantly Visual Studio flies on this drive. Even on high end NVMe SSDs Visual Studio would still choke for me from time to time. However this drive has eliminated that problem. As a software developer who often works from home this is a big deal. It saves me time and I don’t have to spend as much time waiting for Visual Studio to load files, index files, etc. It also dramatically speeds up solution build and rebuilds. Further it helps speed up virtual machines.
Is this drive necessary? If you can use it for your workload, maybe, otherwise absolutely not, it’s a luxury item. Spend the money on better GPU/CPU if you’re a gamer first and foremost. But if you’re a performance enthusiast like me, if you enjoy playing with new memory technology and you can afford an awesome toy that will make your computer noticeably faster I highly recommend it. It won’t provide you the same speed boost that switching from HDD to SSD did, but it will be way more noticeable than the switch from SATA SSD to NVMe was.
| Hard Drive | 280 GB |
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