Kioxia Exceria 1TB M.2 SSD for £54.99 from AWD-IT (was £59.99)
Usually, these discounted SSDs are able to hit their low price points because they use the cheapest available flash memory, QLC NAND, and leave out a DRAM cache. These sorts of drives are still great for media and game storage, but tend to suffer in terms of longevity and sustained write performance. This Exceria drive, on the other hand, offers TLC NAND and comes with a DRAM cache. That makes its performance more reliable, rather than starting off fast and then dipping precipitously in extended write scenarios. It may not be the fastest PCIe drive in the world in terms of peak speeds, with up to 1700MB/s reads and 1600MB/s writes, but its random performance is actually quite strong - 350K IOPS reads and 400K IOPS writes put it in the same league as high-end PCIe 3.0 SSDs. And though its sequential speeds are a little low, they’re still several times faster than even the best SATA SSDs, which cap out around 550MB/s, and a lot faster than any older mechanical hard drives you may be replacing. So this is a drive you can use for a whole lot of stuff, be it for media or games, and as there’s a DRAM cache, and it uses TLC NAND memory, you can also use it as your primary drive, where your OS is installed. The Kioxia Exceria 1TB for £54.99 is a solid SSD for a whole range of uses, and even if it is a little bit slow in terms of peak speeds compared to more modern PCIe 3.0 or 4.0 SSDs, it still makes a lot of sense at this reduced price point thanks to its reliable performance.
