At 2TB for your Steam stash, at least you won't have to swap games in and out as often, which significantly helps to lessen the write burden. I had ARK running once on Linux: It loaded ARK faster from a hard disk than Windows loaded it from NVMe...

Generally, we would expect BiCS5 to be less efficient than B47R. In our testing, these drives largely peak at 3-4W when something like the 2TB SN740 is rated for a peak of 6.3W, a substantial difference. Our 2TB SN770 reached a peak of 4.91W, which is noticeably less efficient at 1TB and 2TB. In practice, the difference probably isn’t massive as long as you have a newer controller, though - the TN436’s E19T is objectively much less efficient.It'd be like making a 5kg washing machine that only works if you put exactly 5kg of clothing in it, if you put 4 or 3 or 2 or 1 kg it just refuses to operate ... But then perhaps, you'd never trust it with your data again, when you see how badly even firmware can be written =:-O The problem there is that a single 2280 m.2 SSD is longer than two 2230 m.2 SSDs, so you wouldn’t be able to have a second m.2 slot unless the aforementioned second slot is past where the 2280 m.2 SSD would normally lay.

And when the firmware has to deal with things like host buffers, that require interaction with host firmware that could be buggy, too, and simply sprinkle your most critical data structures with random bits, you wonder if these firmware engineers might have burn out or a drinking problem, especially since these junior guys only get to work on the cheaper entry level products, which are much harder to handle than when you've got everything fully under your own control. You're after the best value for money: 1TB 2230 NVMe drives are simply better value for money than this 2TB drive right now. It would be interesting to try testing this. Like, a decent SSD and controller should write initially to the pSLC cache, but if it's only at ~40 MB/s, the cache can then be immediately flushed to QLC and would perhaps never fill up (until the SSD is completely full). The problem is that writing even 100GB of data at 40 MB/s takes a while, about 40 minutes. I guess that would be the question: if write speeds are slow, like sub-100 MB/s, do the SSDs even use their pSLC caches, or do they just write straight to TLC/QLC NAND? Take your large game library wherever you are with up to 2TB 1 of trusted Western Digital TLC NAND storage.Revitalize and expand the storage of your M.2 2230 SSD compatible laptop such as many Microsoft ® Surface and Dell™ models. You're chasing speed and capacity: this 2TB drive makes some sacrifices to hit that sort of capacity. A 1TB or smaller drive will usually offer a lot higher write speeds.

It would be interesting to try testing this. Like, a decent SSD and controller should write initially to the pSLC cache, but if it's only at ~40 MB/s, the cache can then be immediately flushed to QLC and would perhaps never fill up (until the SSD is completely full). The problem is that writing even 100GB of data at 40 MB/s takes a while, about 40 minutes. I guess that would be the question: if write speeds are slow, like sub-100 MB/s, do the SSDs even use their pSLC caches, or do they just write straight to TLC/QLC NAND?Yup, it's at that point when you want to start reading the controller's source code.But... I've also had some very old Android tablets die on storage that seemed to reprogram flash at EEPROM speeds, never giving up ...before I did.