Remember the first SSDs, like Intel X25-M. Early examples offered just 80GB of storage back in the mists of 2008. Oh, and the price? A mere $595. Yup, the idea of an SSD for all your storage needs felt like a long way off.
But not today, not even with flash memory pricing having ticked up of late. Not when you can get a speedy M.2 drive measuring fully 4TB in capacity for $223.99 from Newegg in the form of the Team Group MP44.
Importantly, this isn't a hideous kludge of a drive using cheapo QLC flash memory. You know, the type that looks good for a few hundred gig of sequential transfer until the SLC cache runs out and the true horror of the QLC flash's underlying performance is exposed.
No, the Team Group MP44 4TB runs glorious, tasty TLC memory of the 232-Layer YMTC variety. Huzzah!
The Maxio MAP1602 controller chip is a lesser known quantity, though we've had first-hand experience with it in the Lexar NM790 4TB, which was surprisingly excellent. But specs look good on this SSD, too. This is a PCie 4.0 drive that tops out at 7.4GB/s for reads and 6.9GB/s writes. This is a DRAM-less drive, which perhaps isn't a huge surprise given the punchy pricing.
But you're still looking at about 650K IOPS in both directions, plus 3,000TB of write endurance. The latter figure means you could write 1,643GB of data per day, every day over five years. It's not going to happen, is it?
In any case, the Team Group MP44 comes with a reassuring five-year warranty, which should cover most needs. Five years from now, no doubt this kind of storage will come free with a box of Corn Flakes. Well, possibly.
In the meantime, you've got 4TB's worth of super speedy, low latency, uber reliable storage. That's enough for quite the Steam library, even accounting for the 100GB-plus installs that some of the latest titles dictate.
Anyway, for most of us, most of the time, 4TB is probably enough. So, it's nice to know you can get that in a single solid-state solution for pretty sensible money.
