I found a second-hand Kioxia XG6 KXG60ZNV1T02 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD priced at $128. Comparable drives in my area usually cost around $120–$130, and this model seems like one of the better options available. The seller reports 100% health in CrystalDiskInfo, but I'm unsure whether that alone is enough to judge the drive. It appears to have only about 2 days and 21 hours of power-on time and roughly 578 GB written since it was manufactured around 2019–2021. I'm considering using it for video editing, so I'd also like to know whether its DRAM cache provides a meaningful advantage. Is this a reasonable price and a safe purchase?
2 Answers
The Kioxia XG6 is generally a solid SSD, and $128 seems reasonable if new 1TB drives are significantly more expensive in your area. Don’t rely only on the health percentage, though—check the total bytes written, power-on hours, unsafe shutdown count, error logs, and temperature. The usage figures you found are extremely low, so the drive may simply have come from a lightly used office laptop. Make sure the seller offers at least a return period or some kind of warranty.
The XG6 is a good TLC drive with a DRAM cache, but DRAM usually doesn’t make a dramatic difference in everyday NVMe use. For video editing, it can help somewhat with sustained workloads, project files, and heavier disk activity, but capacity, write endurance, and having a separate scratch or project drive may matter more. At $128, I’d buy it only after verifying the complete SMART report and confirming that a new drive isn’t close in price.
I’m mainly interested in it for video editing, which is why I was wondering whether the DRAM cache matters more in that situation. I’ll ask for the full SMART details before deciding.
That was my hope too—that it came from an office laptop that was barely used and then stored for a long time. The low power-on time and 578 GB written do seem reassuring, assuming the SMART data is genuine.