Get the 2TB Crucial P3 PCIe 3.0 SSD for £104 Get the 2TB Kingston KC3000 PCIe 4.0 SSD for £155
The P3 is what I’d recommend for most people that need a fast drive for their OS installation, media or game storage (or all of the above!). It’s PCIe 3.0, so its sequential read and write speeds of 3500MB/s and 3000MB/s are excellent for the category. Its random read and write speeds, at 650K IOPS and 700K IOPS respectively, are also incredible, resulting in shortened loading times compared to slower SATA drives. Where it falls down slightly is in sustained performance, where the lack of a DRAM cache means that write speeds drop after a few minutes, limiting performance in content creation (eg writing a video file) or copying over a massive number of files (eg when restoring very large game directories backed up elsewhere). This isn’t likely to affect you during normal use though, like gaming and using Windows, so this is a perfectly acceptable sacrifice given the significantly lower price. The KC3000 is more expensive, but you also get a lot more here. It’s a PCIe 4.0 drive instead of PCIe 3.0, so you get a significant boost to both sequential speeds (7000MB/s reads and writes) and random speeds (up to 1M IOPS reads and writes). This drive uses a DRAM cache, so sustained performance is much better than the P3, making it more suitable for heavy use like the content creation tasks we mentioned before - and its endurance rating is double that of the P3, at 1.6TBW for the 2TB model. Incidentally, it also meets the required specifications for PS5, in case you want to add one to your other gaming machine… So: two great deals here thanks to the Ebay 10% discount code, so well worth considering if you’re in the market - and no worries if you’re not, I appreciate you reading the end of this post anyway.
