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Solid-state drives now come in two main interface types: SATA, which tops out near 600 MB/s in theory and 500-560 MB/s in real-world use, and NVMe, which runs over PCIe and can hit roughly 3,500 MB/s on older Gen3 drives up to nearly 15,000 MB/s on newer Gen5 models. Both technologies store data on flash memory and vastly outperform mechanical hard drives, but they differ sharply in how they connect to and communicate with a computer.
Newegg is selling the MSI Spatium M461 2TB PCIe 4.0 SSD for $299.99 using promo code SSD73852, working out to about 10 cents per gigabyte. The drive uses a Phison E21T controller with 3D NAND and NVMe 1.4 support, delivering sequential speeds up to 5,000/4,200 MBps read/write, backed by a five-year warranty and 900 TBW endurance rating.
Reviews from Notebookcheck and PC Gamer found that external GPU enclosures connected via Thunderbolt suffer meaningful performance losses compared to desktop PCIe slots, ranging from 7 to 32 percent depending on resolution and card. PC Gamer found an RTX 4070 Ti ran about 25 percent slower over Thunderbolt than OCuLink, with worse stuttering and lower frame-rate consistency, and found that pairing an eGPU with a faster RTX 4090 yielded diminishing returns versus a full desktop connection.
A Reddit user reported that the 8-pin connectors on their Thermal Grizzly WireView power-monitoring adapter overheated and melted while connected to a Radeon RX 7900 XTX, after experiencing repeated freezes and black screens. The user says the connectors were fully seated, and Thermal Grizzly has reached out to investigate the cause, which remains unconfirmed.
Tom's Hardware reviewed Kioxia's Exceria Pro G2, a PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD built on the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller and Kioxia's 218-layer BiCS8 TLC flash, tested here in its 2TB configuration. The drive posts sequential speeds up to roughly 14,900 MB/s read and 12,700 MB/s write, alongside strong sustained write performance, good power efficiency and low random read latency.
YouTube modding channel TecLab rebuilt a Galax RTX 5090D HOF OC LAB XOC by removing its dual 16-pin power connectors and soldering in three 8-pin PCIe connectors directly to the power regulators, rewiring sense pins to remove power limits. Using liquid cooling, they pushed the card from 400W up to 900W, drawing over 120A and hitting clock speeds of 3,400 MHz, all through hardware changes alone with no BIOS or software tuning.
Tom's Hardware reviewed Goodram's PX700, a budget-tier PCIe 4.0 SSD, finding it delivers solid speed, strong power efficiency, and cool single-sided operation. The drive, made by the established EU memory assembler Goodram, outperformed expectations against comparable drives using similar hardware in its price class.
Amazon has cut the price of Crucial's 4TB T705 SSD to $502.51, down from nearly $700 a few weeks ago and its lowest price since February. That makes it the most affordable PCIe Gen 5 drive currently available, undercutting the Samsung 990 Evo Plus by about $60 despite offering true four-lane Gen 5 performance.
Arm has introduced its next-generation Neoverse CSS N4 semi-custom compute subsystem, codenamed Ranger, built on TSMC's N3P process node. The platform allows cloud and chip partners to configure between 8 and 128 Arm Neoverse N4 cores per die, clocked up to 3.8 GHz, with support for DDR5 or LPDDR6 memory, up to 256 MB of L3 cache, and 128 lanes of PCIe 7/6 or CXL 4.0.
A shopper known as @whateversunnyfinds bought a $30 Asus Hyper M.2 x16 Gen 4 expansion card at Kuwait City's Souq-al-Juma flea market and discovered three 2TB Samsung 980 Pro SSDs concealed beneath its heatsink. Each drive currently retails for roughly $400-$500, meaning the find could be worth $1,300-$1,500 despite one of the card's four M.2 slots being empty.
A hobbyist in China modified an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 to eliminate its external power connectors entirely, forcing the card to run solely on the 75W supplied by the PCIe slot via a shunt resistor mod. The resulting single-slot, low-profile card uses a bare-bones blower cooler with no proper heatsink or thermal pads on the memory chips, relying on a thin metal shroud touching the core directly for cooling.
Amazon is selling Samsung's new 990 PCIe 4.0 SSD in 2TB capacity for $339.99, a $190 cut from its $529.99 list price. The drive is a QLC variant of the 990 EVO Plus, built with Samsung's PiccoloQ controller and V9 QLC flash, offering full Gen 4 bandwidth. A 1TB version is also discounted, though the deal is time-limited.