I'm planning my first PC build, mainly for gaming, video editing, rendering, and other creative work. I'm comparing these 2TB SSDs at the following prices: Corsair MP700 Pro with air cooler for €300, Crucial P510 for €260, Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 for €260, and WD_BLACK SN850X for €280. Which one offers the best overall choice, and are there any cheaper or better alternatives I should consider?
2 Answers
Ignoring the prices, I’d roughly rank them MP700 Pro first, SN850X second, then the Crucial P510 and Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 together. The first two have onboard DRAM, which can help with sustained, demanding workloads. For normal gaming and everyday creative work, though, the real-world differences will be fairly small.
I’d lean toward the Kioxia Exceria Plus G4. The MP700 Pro may be faster in certain benchmarks, but you probably won’t notice much difference outside of very specific workloads. The SN850X is technically slower than the others in this comparison, although it should still feel essentially the same during normal use. The P510 and G4 are close in performance, but Kioxia seems like the safer long-term choice for warranty and support, so I’d pick the G4 at €260.
DRAM matters much more for SATA SSDs than it does for most NVMe drives. NVMe models can use Host Memory Buffer and SLC caching, so unless you’re writing huge amounts of data every day, a DRAM-less drive usually won’t have a noticeable disadvantage. For an unusually heavy professional workload, a drive with DRAM can still be worthwhile.