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This drive is available in a wide range of capacities, with the largest being the 1TB model we've linked here, but if you want to go smaller for whatever reason, Sabrent also offers 256GB and 512GB options. We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage. Windows and Linux will see just a committed write, turning off the device won't loose you any data, it might just not have the opportunity to do the house-keeping and the SLC cache will remain permanently filled while the drive has to bypass it for new data resulting in HDD class write speeds. 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. Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash.As for different capacities, the MP600 Mini is available just in a 1TB config, but that's still going to be a worthy upgrade, especially if you've got one of the lower capacity options.

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?

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It's worth noting also that the installation process is a little fiddly, but perfectly achieveable with a little patience and this handy iFixit guide that explains it all. These days I just keep running my manual TRIMs when I do major updates and most of my SSDs never go near the 90% mark anyway before I expand or reallocate: prices below €50/TB evict quite a lot of lesser capacity drives natuerally, which interestingly have never gone near 90% remaining life in all those years. At 2TB for your Steam stash, at least you won't have to swap games in and out as often, which signficantly helps to lessen the write burden. 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. But then perhaps, you'd never trust it with your data again, when you see how badly even firmware can be written =:-O