Electric Nightmares

Our four part series about generative AI and its use in video games

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Pick up a 2TB NVMe SSD for £118.98 thanks to a 15% off code at Ebay UK

A great price for a brand new high-speed SSD from Ebuyer.

The WD SN550 is going cheap at Ebuyer's Ebay UK page right now, with a 2TB drive costing just £118.98. That's an awesome deal for what is already one of the best value PCIe 3.0 SSDs, offering sequential read speeds up to 2600MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 1800MB/s. That's about five times faster than even the fastest SATA drive in terms of peak read speeds, making this an excellent choice for handling large files such as 4K videos, disc images and so on.

To get this reduced price, you'll need to use the code SPEND15 at Ebay. This knocks £21 off the price, moving it from £140 to £119.

Note that Amazon UK has this drive at an even higher price, £150 which is the "lowest price in 30 days". Ha, well, we've got you beat eh Amazon?

So, is this drive any good? Well, it's quite competitive in terms of its random read and write spec - 360K IOPS for reads and 384K IOPS for writes. By comparison, one of the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives, the Samsung 970 Evo Plus, has up to 600K IOPS - so you're getting about two thirds of the random performance for much less than two thirds of the price (the 970 Evo Plus 2TB retails for £209 at Amazon, for context). That makes this drive an excellent value, even if it may fall behind the Samsung drive fractionally in terms of things like gaming load times.

For more information on the SN550, check out Katharine's review of the drive from its debut in 2020. She called the drive 'disgustingly good value' then, and that was for a drive that cost £125 for a 1TB model - clearly, things have improved substantially since then!

The only real question mark here is the drive's QLC NAND and lack of a DRAM cache, which means that it offers poorer sustained performance than more expensive TLC drives with a DRAM cache, but this kind of comes with the territory in terms of budget drives. However, if you are looking to maximise your performance within the PCIe 3.0 (or indeed, 4.0) category, then you should have a look at our picks for the best gaming SSDs.

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Will Judd avatar

Will Judd

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Will Judd is a journeyman from the forges of Digital Foundry, here to spread the good word about hardware deals and StarCraft.

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