Micron 5210 Ion SSD | MTFDDAK7T6QDE | 7.68TB | Qlc | SATA 6GB/S | 2.5-Inch Enterprise Solid State Drive

Product Information

In our tests, the Intel 670p loaded Final Fantasy at the same speed or faster than competitors. It also finished just two places below the vaunted PCIe 4.0 Samsung 980 Pro in PCMark 10. Those are very respectable marks for a budget drive.

Then there's the issue of longevity. While it is true that SSDs wear out over time (each cell in a flash-memory bank can be written to and erased a limited number of times, measured by SSD makers as a "terabytes written" or TBW rating), thanks to TRIM command technologythat dynamically optimizes these read/write cycles, you're more likely to discard the system for obsolescence before you start running into read/write errors with an SSD. If you're really worried, several tools can let you know if you're approaching the drive's rated end of life. Eventually, hard drives will wear out from constant use, as well, since they use physical recording methods. Longevity is a wash when it's separated from travel and ruggedness concerns. The overall takeaway? Hard drives win on price and capacity. SSDs work best if speed, ruggedness, form factor, noise, or fragmentation (technically, a subset of speed) are important factors to you. If it weren't for the price and capacity issues, SSDs would be the hands-down winner.As netbooks and other ultraportable laptops became more capable, SSD capacities increased and eventually standardized on the 2.5-inch notebook form factor. This way, you could pop a 2.5-inch hard drive out of your laptop or desktop and replace it easily with an SSD, and manufacturers could design around just one kind of drive bay. The traditional spinning hard drive is the basic non-volatile storage on a computer. That is, information on it doesn't "go away" when you turn off the system, unlike data stored in RAM. A hard drive is essentially a metal platter with a magnetic coating that stores your data, whether weather reports from the last century, a high-definition copy of the original Star Warstrilogy, or your digital music collection. A read/write head on an arm (or a set of them) accesses the data while the platters are spinning.

The price of SSDs is coming down, but they're still too expensive to fully replace the terabytes of data that some users have in their PCs and Macs for mass storage that doesn't need to be fast, just simply there. Cloud storage isn't free, either: You'll continue to pay as long as you want personal storage on the internet. Local storage won't go away until we have reliable wireless Internet everywhere, including in planes and out in the wilderness. Of course, by that time, there may be something better. This is also where a spec known as the "terabytes written" rating (or TBW) comes in. It refers to how much data can be written to a drive over its life before some cells on that drive begin to fail. The entire drive itself won't stop functioning, but rather, less and less storage will be made available as time goes on.CARRY WEIGHT.Most SSDs weigh a negligible couple of ounces. The carabiner retention loop of SanDisk's Extreme family of external SSDs is especially handy, because many SSDs are small and light enough that losing them is an easy and expensive mistake. In time, other, more compact SSD form factors emerged, like the mSATA Mini PCIe SSD card and the aforementioned M.2 SSD format (which comes in SATA and PCI Express variants). M.2 has expanded rapidly through the laptop SSD world, and today the SSDs that still use the 2.5-inch form factor are mostly meant for upgrading desktop PCs and older laptops. M.2 is the form factor where modern systems are at. Graphic arts and engineering professionals:Video and photo editors fill up and wear out storage faster than most other folks. Replacing or adding a 2TB hard drive will be cheaper than replacing a 500GB SSD, though that gap is closing.

The Intel 670p is an older driver, but it is also a proven budget option that is often on steep sale. It’s best to grab it at 1TB or 2TB, as the 512GB model is slower with a smaller pSLC cache. The drive has DRAM, which is nice, and it has the fastest QLC on the market, even now. Performance outside of the cache does not suffer as much as a consequence. That said, both SSDs and hard drives do the same job: They boot your system, and store your applications and personal files. But each type of storage has its own unique traits. How do they differ, and why would you want to get one over the other? How Expensive Is SSD vs. HDD?If none of the drives we've selected for this roundup sounds appealing to you (or you already own an extra internal SSD), there's one more option available: SSD enclosures. These are plastic or metal housings into which you can put your own SATA 2.5-inch or M.2 solid-state drive to take with you on the go. Accidental Damage-Additional Information: Accidental Damage Service excludes theft, loss, and damage due to fire, flood or other acts of nature, or intentional damage. Customer may be required to return damaged unit to Dell. Limit of 1 qualified incident per contract year. For more information, consumers visit Accidental Damage Service Contract (Consumer) or commercial customers visit Accidental Damage Service Contract (Commercial). External solid-state drives are, essentially, internal SSDs (the same kind that power laptops or live inside desktops) with an outer shell and some bridging electronics. As a result, external drives use one of two internal "bus types" that, in part, dictate their peak speed: Serial ATA (SATA), or PCI Express (PCIe). The latter is usually associated these days with Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe), a protocol that is optimized for the characteristics of SSDs and speeds up data transfers.