488
SanDisk's Name is Now Mud
(petapixel.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Yeah Sammy still makes some of the best drives in the industry. However, the company is pretty scummy. So keep that in mind if customer support is important to you. Also bear in mind, they offer no warranty service from Canada, you will be sent to the US centre and from there, it’s all uphill as they will cite region conflicts, etc. RMA will be hit and miss.
Basically manufacturers now are cutting DRAM from their offerings which means most drives can’t handle large files as that I’ll overflow their paltry buffers and your speeds will plummet to that of a USB drive. WD SN770, Crucial P3, Kingston NV2, all omit DRAM. In fact, most of the cheaper offerings cut the feature on their drives.
As a general rule, I look at DRAM first, then cell type (try to avoid QLC over TLC), controller type can be important if you have specific needs (I purchased a m.2 to CDEF adapter for my Xbox and it only supports drives with a specific controller), and then warranty and product support.
In all honesty, this is not a bad list to get you started (not sure I’d put the 990 first, but it’s not crazy either): https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-ssds,3891.html
Thanks for the info and the details.
I had watched a video some years ago of LTT about DRAM-less SSD and had been actively avoiding them since then. Will surely keep these details in mind.