Budget SSDs are commodity items
Flash drives are probably sexier.
SSDs are everywhere. Even the cheapest laptops and systems have ditched mechanical storage, and all but the cheapest refurb runout models come with an M.2 SATA or NVMe SSD. Though there are M.2 drives with eye catching heatsinks and even RGB lighting, most of them are bland. They’re there to do a job out of sight and out of mind, buried inside a laptop or under a motherboard heatsink, never to be seen. They are, frankly, boring.
There’s little to differentiate budget models from one another. SSD makers continue to promote sequential read and write speeds as the be all and end all. Fast sequential performance is a good characteristic to have, but it’s the IOPS, latency, and random performance that provide the responsiveness we all take for granted. Does the average user care if a 10GB transfer takes two seconds or three? Probably not, and anyway, those maximum speeds require very fast source and destination drives that most systems typically wouldn’t have.
I reviewed the Kingston NV1 in this issue. I actually struggled to find a lot to say about it as when I asked, Kingston declined to disclose key specifications in order keep open the option to change things like the flash or controller in the future. We understand the reasoning for this, but it also takes information away from the consumer. Adata recently took a black eye for altering the components of its SX8200 drive mid-life, which resulted in a performance hit. A modern cheapie SSD isn’t all that much different from a flash drive. There just isn’t much to know about them anymore. Entrylevel NVMe SSDs are now primarily differentiated by price, capacity and to a lesser extent, warranty.
This means flash drives and budget SSDs are essentially commodity items. They are easily interchangeable. You’re really not going to notice the difference between drive A at $100 and drive B at $105. If the $105 drive comes with a better endurance rating and a longer warranty, then that’s the drive you should go for. Will most users care though? Many will take the $5 saving.
Most buyers of affordable laptops and systems probably don’t know much, if anything about the drive in their system other than its capacity. A Kingston or a Samsung or a Crucial drive is all the same to them. A discussion around enticing this kind of user to upgrade isn’t going to go far beyond adding capacity. As enthusiasts, we want to know more about what’s under the hood in our systems. Performance still matters at the high end as does endurance, reliability, aesthetics and things like the software package or encryption support. However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between budget drives. Reviewing them isn’t very revealing, and marketing them must be even harder. NVMe SSDs are essential components, but let’s face it, the entry level ones are pretty boring, much like a DDR4-3200MHz kit is beyond its look and price. If you’re strictly looking for a budget drive, you might as well go for one that offers a good price-per-GB or perhaps a five-year warranty vs a threeyear one. Do you go for a Kingston NV1 or a Crucial P1? How about a WD SN550? Whatever’s on special that day? That kind of interchangeability is what defines a commodity product.
“Fast sequential performance is a good characteristic to have, but it’s the IOPS, latency and random performance that provide the responsiveness we all take for granted. Does the average user care if a 10GB transfer takes two seconds or three?”