In the world of SSDs, it tends to be the fastest or the highest capacity that gets the most attention. This deal from Team Group is neither of those things, but it's still a great deal nonetheless.

2TB of NVMe storage is one cent under $100, which means you're paying less than 5 cents per gigabyte. As I stress, this is an extremely low price for a solid state drive, especially one of this size.

Nor is there any cheap hardware used; the NAND flash chip is a Micron TLC, and the controller is a Phison E21T model. Speed records cannot be broken, but reliability and longevity are almost guaranteed.

While there is no DRAM to boost performance, an important table that stores all data locations on the drive is stored in the PC's system memory (called the host memory buffer) to help ensure that the drive's performance is always constant.

And speaking of performance, the peak read/write speeds of 4,800 MB/s and 4,400 MB/s are nothing to write home about, but they are more than adequate for most scenarios, or at least gaming Since we are focusing on AI processing and high-resolution video editing Otherwise, you won't lose anything.

The only downside to the MP44L would be the size of the SLC cache; most SSDs have a small amount of NAND flash operating in SLC (single-level cell) mode to increase the speed at which SSDs write small bursts of data. This is the fastest operating mode, but also has the smallest storage capacity.

The MP44L's SLC cache is considerably smaller than the best gaming SSDs (about 70 GB), and when it fills up, write performance drops by at least 50%. This is most noticeable when trying to install very large games, with the last third of the installation taking much longer than the first stage.

In my opinion, this is a small price to pay for a wide, cheap, cool running SSD. Sure, we all want our gaming PCs to be adorned with blazingly fast drives, but in most cases the extra speed is somewhat wasted. Here, you don't have to pay for something you seldom use.