I wasn't expecting much from this drive, I already had a Samsung 860 Evo SATA SSD in my laptop, however the 500GB capacity was getting a bit tight. I opted for the 1TB model on Prime Day for a steal at $80. It arrived next day, and the installation was cake (if you can insert a stick of RAM, you can install an M.2 drive.
After getting everything installed, cloned, and the boot order modified, the drive was performing about the same as my old SATA SSD on first boot. After installing the requisite Corsair Storage Executive software and making a few tweaks there, the SSD started to really wake up. I can boot to the login screen on my laptop in about 2 seconds after POST. After login, everything is ready to go. Chrome launches instantly, Steam updates in a matter of seconds, and everything is near instant.
The drive is rated at about 2000MB/s read and 1700MB/s write. Imagine my surprise when Crystal Disk Mark put up an ABSOLUTELY BLAZING 4150+MB/s READ AND WRITE. I was questioning whether or not I was sent the drive I ordered. I reran the test a few more times, and similar numbers came up every time. My 970 Evo NVMe drive in my desktop puts up closer to 3200MB/s, which is still very extremely fast compared to anything on the SATA bus (SATA SSDs normally have about a 550MB/s cap).
Games launch as you would expect for a drive of this speed. Tomb Raider I (1996) and Tomb Raider II (1997), even with DOSbox emulation, are fast and fluid. The 1050 in my laptop doesn't break a sweat on those. The Talos Principle, with everything cranked to the max, only blinks the load screen for a moment before you're in. I don't even remember what the load screens looks like in Portal 2. The recent Tomb Raider games (2013+) load so fast, you can't read the load screen tips, normally only reading the first few words before you're back in the action.
I will say the Samsung software is a little bit better in terms of overall UI and function (Corsair does not offer a self-contained firmware update, you must download the firmware separately and point the software to the downloaded file), however you're not spending any time in there anyway once the Over Provisioning cache is set up and a few other performance related check boxes.
So your options right now are the following:
• Spend twice as much for a Samsung SSD and get slower speeds
• Spend less than $100, get 1TB of space, and blow away other, more expensive drives by at least 25%
This drive will not disappoint!
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Solid State Hard Drive |
|---|
