The WD SN550 goes low cost at Ebuyer’s Ebay UK web page proper now, with a 2TB drive costing simply £118.98. That’s an superior deal for what’s already among the finest worth PCIe 3.0 SSDs, providing sequential learn speeds as much as 2600MB/s and sequential write speeds as much as 1800MB/s. That’s about 5 instances sooner than even the quickest SATA drive by way of peak learn speeds, making this a superb alternative for dealing with giant information reminiscent of 4K movies, disc pictures and so forth.

To get this decreased value, you will want to make use of the code SPEND15 at Ebay. This knocks £21 off the worth, shifting it from £140 to £119.

Note that Amazon UK has this drive at a fair increased value, £150 which is the “lowest value in 30 days”. Ha, nicely, we have got you beat eh Amazon?

So, is that this drive any good? Well, it is fairly aggressive by way of its random learn and write spec – 360K IOPS for reads and 384K IOPS for writes. By comparability, one of many quickest PCIe 3.0 drives, the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, has as much as 600K IOPS – so that you’re getting about two thirds of the random efficiency for a lot lower than two thirds of the worth (the 970 Evo Plus 2TB retails for £209 at Amazon, for context). That makes this drive a superb worth, even when it could fall behind the Samsung drive fractionally by way of issues like gaming load instances.

For extra data on the SN550, try Katharine’s evaluate of the drive from its debut in 2020. She referred to as the drive ‘disgustingly good worth’ then, and that was for a drive that value £125 for a 1TB mannequin – clearly, issues have improved considerably since then!

The solely actual query mark right here is the drive’s QLC NAND and lack of a DRAM cache, which implies that it presents poorer sustained efficiency than costlier TLC drives with a DRAM cache, however this type of comes with the territory by way of finances drives. However, in case you are seeking to maximise your efficiency throughout the PCIe 3.0 (or certainly, 4.0) class, then you need to take a look at our picks for the greatest gaming SSDs.