WD Blue SN550

SSD: $110 1TB WD Blue SN550. Case: $100 Syber L Series ATX Full-Tower Gaming Case w/ USB 3.0, ARGB & Both Side Tempered Window Panel. PSU: $105 Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 Series 750W 80 PLUS GOLD Ultra Quiet Full Modular Power Supply.

it's one of the best sata ssds but in the end its still much slower than most nvme drives that get around this price, such as the wd sn550 or those recent sales on the xpg sx8200 pro. QLC nvme drives will generally be faster than the mx500 in typical use cases but much slower for large file transfers that exhaust the cache on the QLC drives (at which point theyre as slow as a hard drive).

Direct to QLC write speeds on my 1TB version are only about 65MB/s, exponentially slower than what I experience with a WD SN550 1TB. At 50% filled it only managed to cope with <20GB of writes before it drops down to ~65MB/s. Can't really see much of a use case for the P2, even as a game drive it will bog down with a bigger game update and is unable to keep up with a 1Gbps internet connection. Did another test too, copying 100GB takes about as long (20 minutes, give or take a few seconds) as a WD Blue 2TB 5400rpm SMR HDD, which in a way is pretty impressive, impressively bad.

I went with a Western digital blue which was fine. Models with storage chips on both side of the stick are too fat. WD Blue SN550 1TB...