You know what’s pretty adorable if you can afford it? Have a really big hard drive or SSD. Back that day, I was over the moon when I picked up a 750MB drive for my gaming PC – I could do a full install of Civilization 2! And there’s room for the X-Wing Alliance! Today’s PC storage deals scornful larger capacity, but the thrill of having a truly massive drive is as powerful as ever.
That brings me to the subject of today’s deals post: Crucial P3, 4TB (!) NVMe drive capable of 3500MB/s sequential reads, down to £299.99 at Amazon. That’s £90 off its usual price and an incredible deal for one of the biggest NVMe SSDs on the market.
Note that the 1TB and 2TB sizes are also discounted and cost the same £75/TB.
So what are the uses of such a large NVMe SSD? Well, my boss Rich at Digital Foundry can’t have enough of these, as they’re perfect for capturing – and editing – high bit rate video files, such as the 4K video we shoot for the YouTube channel. mine. Moving these huge files, which can be up to hundreds of gigabytes each, takes a long time even on a fast SATA drive – so an NVMe drive is the way to go, with this modestly priced P3 up to seven times faster. times that of the fastest SATA. CD driver. If you regularly deal with any kind of large files, especially for work, then an NVMe SSD can be a big time saver that makes your job a lot easier.
In addition to offering greater sequential speeds – and high capacities to match – these drives also offer a speed advantage when it comes to game load times. This P3 is rated for 650K read IOPS and 700K write IOPS, which is about 70% of the speed of the fastest PCIe 4.0 drives – not bad for a cheaper PCIe 3.0 drive that uses QLC NAND and an SLC instead DRAM cache.
Of course, in addition to its performance, this 4TB drive has another important function: to make you giggle when you look at My Computer and see 3.84TB of unclaimed SSD storage. What a feeling. I picked up a WD Blue SATA 4TB WD Blue SSD when one was on sale last year, and I still get overjoyed when I see how much space is left – not having to carefully micromanage your memory is a blessing.
The Crucial P3 has yet to be reviewed by the Rock Paper Shotgun, but the likes of Tom’s Hardware, Tech Advisor, PC Mag, and PC World all rave about its real-world performance, 5-year warranty, and of course value. And with £90 off today, the 4TB P3 has never been a better option!
