It's a QLC drive, so the write endurance is going to be terrible and write speed will slow way down when the cache gets full. For that price it would be good for a game drive since it will be written infrequently and you don't lose anything that can't be re-downloaded when it craps out.
this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2024
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Why? WD seems to be able to make fast QLC drives with equivalent endurance to TLC.
It probably has a larger SLC cache than most QLC drives to get decent performance. A write endurance of 300 drive writes is not great though.
That's for the worst case scenario. In larger sizes the QLC models have higher write endurance than the TLC ones. Also 300 writes is pretty typical for 500GB TLC drives. Not saying it's great but it's been the norm for this size for years.
AFAIK, there is no need for dedicated SLC cache. They can run multi-level flash as single-level and as a result they can configure how much of the QLC is used as "SLC" cache. And yeah, there's probably plenty.
The Samsung 990 PRO 2TB has 600 overwrites.
Thats one of the best consumer grade ssd out there today.
300 is fine for most people.
only static games or ones with small or infrequent updates.
updating many gigabytes of game files frequently will make you wish you were running off a mechanical hdd.. shingled, even. been there
Yeah, you wouldn't want to use it for new release games. Once they've been out for a couple of years, they usually don't get frequent updates and you don't have to pay a premium just to be a beta tester.