SSD prices have been on the uptick recently, following a record-breaking 2023 where oversupply caused the best deals on high-capacity SSDs we’ve ever seen. That means that current prices aren’t going to beat out last year’s Black Friday deals, but there are still some decent options that carve out a better value proposition than their peers. One example is the Kingston NV2, a 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD going for just £50 on Amazon UK at the moment – some £14 below its UK RRP.
The Kingston NV2 is the company’s budget PCIe 4.0 SSD of choice, with a range of potential sub-components that combine to produce up to 3500MB/s reads and 2800MB/s writes while using less power than PCIe 3.0 drives, thanks to fewer PCIe lanes being needed for the drive to achieve its speed goals.
The drive uses more expensive TLC flash memory, but isn’t equipped with a DRAM cache, so sustained performance falls down compared to similarly-fast models with DRAM. Instead, it uses Host Buffer Memory technology, which uses your computer’s RAM for lookup tables and other important SSD functions. This is a slightly less efficient setup, but it’s an improvement over non-HMB DRAM-less drives.
Overall, a reasonable choice that ranks among the better value PCIe 4.0 drives on the market. For more gaming SSD recommendations, check out our article of nearly the same name!
