GoKawiilWhy you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Inland remains a reliable partner in this volatile SSD environment, offering decent drives with good warranties at competitive prices. The QN450, a drive by its designation, which should be relegated to secondary storage, surprises. Going by its specifications, it looks like yet another cheap SSD to lure in budget shoppers, but, in fact, under this misleading varnish is an excellent drive that would otherwise escape notice. This is one to keep on your buy lists.
The surprises are quick and meaningful. Performance across the board, even with sustained writes, is very good. The drive also delivers very high power efficiency, which is crucial for a drive that will end up in laptops or the PS5. It’s also affordable, which makes sense given its market positioning – it is meant to be a Kingston NV3 killer, the drive you reach for when you just need something to complete your build – but it frankly performs closer to the high side of the stack. For the price, that’s hard to beat.
The downsides? Given the specifications and positioning, we would have to expect variable hardware builds over the life of the product, which means the underlying components can change. You might get what we did, or you might get something worse. We highly recommend checking your drive when you get it. This unfortunately requires some research on your part, but that’s standard for the industry at this point. More directly, the QN450 has a relatively low write endurance rating (TBW) for its class. This could suggest that it is meant to use QLC flash even though our sample had high-performance TLC. Some caution is therefore warranted, although we would say that, given the pricing at the time of review, this drive would compete favorably against QLC-based drives in its segment.
Inland QN450 Specifications
Swipe to scroll horizontally Product 500GB 1TB 2TB 4TB Pricing $124.99 $194.99 $314.99 $449.99 Form Factor M.2 2280 (Single-sided) M.2 2280 (Single-sided) M.2 2280 (Single-sided) M.2 2280 (Single-sided) Interface / Protocol PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe 2.0 PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe 2.0 PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe 2.0 PCIe 4.0 x4
NVMe 2.0 Controller N/A Silicon Motion SM2268XT2 Realtek RTS5772DL (listed) Phison E21T (listed) DRAM N/A (HMB) N/A (HMB) N/A (HMB) N/A (HMB) Flash Memory N/A Micron 232-Layer TLC (B58R) Micron 232-Layer QLC (N58R) Micron 232-Layer QLC (N58R) Sequential Read N/A 5,000 MB/s 5,000 MB/s 5,000 MB/s Sequential Write N/A 4,000 MB/s 4,000 MB/s 4,200 MB/s Random Read N/A 300K IOPS 300K IOPS 600K IOPS Random Write N/A 450K IOPS 450K IOPS 800K IOPS Active Power (Avg) N/A 5.3W 5.3W 4W Endurance N/A 300TBW 600TBW 900TBW Part Number 618996784523 618996774760 618996774777 618996757039 Warranty 6-Year 6-Year 6-Year 6-Year
... continue reading