Time for a minor but significant upgrade. After searching for what feels like forever, I have found a great SSD that hits all the right boxes at an affordable price. I picked up the
Teamgroup T-Force G-50 2TB SSD for $104 USD. I could have spent an extra $20 on something a bit better, but that $20 went towards a new cover for my
headphones headband which was needed for a long time as well.
This drive is DRAM-less but I've come to realize that is not the most important thing when it comes to SSDs. DRAM is nice to have but often more expensive by a solid $30-40 than what I paid for my new drive with almost unnoticeable performance benefits in real-world usage. DRAM-less drives have also come a long way and are not all made the same, I've since realized being DRAM-less is not an umbrella term for being a bad drive. TLC/SLC cache size is more important when choosing budget drives. In my case with my WD Blue SN570, the SLC cache size was a meek 15GB, meaning downloading anything above ~10GB to that drive caused it to fill up the cache immediately and slow download speeds to a crawl. The drive I picked up as a whopping 600GB cache size, meaning I will almost never see it perform slower than expected.
It is also PCIe 4.0 which is faster than the slot I have on my mobo, so I will basically get the max speed of what my hardware can support all the time. Technically should be faster too, since the WD Blue maxes at 3500MB/s while the slot can hit up to 4000MB/s. Not like I ever could use the WD Blue at that fast of a speed though anyways.
Also being 2TB is a big benefit over 1TB of course. I will use this as my main drive, and keep my SATA and SATA M2 SSDs installed for extra storage. I may wipe the WD Blue drive and try to sell it for cheap. Good drive if you don't ever game or do anything intensive on your PC. This means I will need to do a clean installation of Windows, I may bite the bullet and just jump to Win11.