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Mum, get the camera! It’s finally happened – a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD is selling for less than £50. The winner of this impromptu contest is Kingston’s NV2, an expectedly budget drive that still manages to deliver some fairly impressive performance according to independent reviews. To squeak in under the £50 mark, you’ll need to use code JAN10 at the checkout at Ebay.
This drive has come up a few times on various deals aggregators, and for a drive that I’ve not personally tested I’m always surprised how positive the reviews are, from commmenters and reviwers alike.
As you might expect for a drive of this price, this is a QLC drive without a DRAM cache, so sustained performance and longevity aren’t strong points – I definitely wouldn’t recommend this drive for video production, for instance, or other heavy content creation tasks. However, for gaming, media or even as an OS drive on a lower-tier machine, it should do quite well.
With read speeds of 3500MB/s and write speeds of 2100MB/s, it’s still significantly faster than even the best SATA SSD (which maxes out at around 550MB/s due to interface limitations), and competitive with early PCIe 3.0 SSDs in terms of peak sequential performance. Reviews from the likes of Techpowerup show quite strong performance too, with the drive exceeding its quoted specs in their testing – athough as Kingston state, the NV2 can be made from a variety of components (controller, NAND) and therefore the quoted specs act more of a guaranteed minimum than a completely accurate description.
If you’d prefer a drive that’s a little more… fixed..? – then you’ll perhaps prefer one of our evergreen SSD recommendations, which includes drives like the WD Blue SN570 or Crucial P3 Plus which also tend to feature regularly in deals posts.