Disregard. This is bad advice.
I canceled this and just got the ADATA XPG XS8200 Pro 1tb instead.
Is this a necro? I haven’t paid over $100 for a 1TB SSD in a year?
No - this was for entry level PCIE4 NVME SSDs originally, and was updated to a high performance PCIE3 NVME SSD.
Most SSDs you see under $100 for 1tb are either SATA DRAM-less drives, which are much slower than PCIE drives, or QLC NVME DRAM-less drives that are much slower and have much lower endurance.
The ADATA XPG GAMMIX S50 Lite is rated at 3900mb/s read and 3200mb/s write and uses a slow controller and generally is pretty slow outside of short bursts of speed.
The ADATA XPG XS8200 Pro is rated at 3500mb/s read and 3000 mb/s write and is about in between the Samsung 970 EVO and 970 PRO in terms of performance. It’s almost as fast as the S50 Lite in short burst, but much much better at sustained reads and writes thanks to a superior controller. It’s only PCIE 3.0, but it’s just faster in general.
There was some drama with a controller change in the XS8200, but it’s unlikely I’ll be able to spot the difference. And the XS8200 had a $10 coupon, making it less expensive than the S50 Lite.
Other options are Sabrent Rocket 4.0, which is around $144 but offers great performance.
Apparently I have the slowest version of the SX8200 - there have been some shenanigans with this particular unit.
I guess that’s why it’s so inexpensive, $119 with a $10 coupon.
Ordered it last night, came this morning.
Did a Crystaldisk Benchmark on all my drives (Except the 1TB Hitachi…seems that one is on the way out and failed to do the test even)
https://i.imgur.com/9APtSQi.png
Pretty happy, even with the slower version 3 controller on the SX8200. Still much faster than my 660p.