XPG Gammix S70 Blade 2TB NVMe SSD | $250 | Amazon
It has been the joy of my life to watch prices on high-speed NVMes go a-tumbling these last few months, and it’s equally joyful to bring these deals right to your doorstep, because I want everyone to have computers that boot up in no time and storage that’s almost meaninglessly fast. It’s my pleasure, therefore, to tell you about this XPG Gammix S70 Blade SSD with 2TB storage that’s on sale right now for 24% off. It’s not the only SSD you can get at that page for a discount, but it’s the coolest-looking one, with a slim little heat spreader where you’d normally find a heatsink, letting you cram it into a thin laptop without worrying about heat dispersion. It’s compatible with your PS5 too, and works with PCIe 4 slots.
A little note on speed: The Amazon page calls out its sequential reads and writes, which are 7,400MB/s and 6,800MB/s, respectively (for context, a gigabit internet connection is only 125MB/s). These are the speeds you’d get while transferring large files like games, but you should expect random reads and writes, which are those where the device is doing a lot of seeking and pulling smaller files, to be lower. Also, you will only see these high speeds when connected to a PCIe 4 slot—PCIe 3, while still very fast, is only capable of half that speed. Luckily, if you only have a PCIe 3 slot, you can save a bit of cash on the 2TB S50 Lite, which only boasts 3,900 MB/s sequential reads and 3,200 sequential writes, when you tick the little coupon box to get an extra $30 off its current price of $220.
Aaaaand a note on compatibility: These SSDs are explicitly compatible with Windows and Linux, but the only mention I see with Mac OS is on the Amazon page for the S50 Lite, which says it is incompatible with Macs. So, sorry Mac users.
This article was originally published by Wes Davis on 02/18/2022, and was updated on 03/18/2022.