Pick up Samsung's ludicrously capacious 8TB SSD for £413 after a 40% discount
Banish spinning rust, once and for all.
I kind of hate mechanical hard drives these days. Yes, they're cheap per gigabyte, yes they're fairly reliable, yes they're absolutely the way to go if you need to store a lot of data and don't care how long it takes to access it. But. But. These drives are hard to go back to after you're used to SSDs, with their near-instant access times, completely silent operation, resistance to shocks, drops and magnets and of course their overall SPEED.
So when I had the chance, I bought the biggest SSD I could afford, a 4TB model at the time, and copied literally every bit of data from the four or five 1TB or smaller hard drives that I'd bought over the years and stuck into my increasingly full PC tower. It was expensive, and it took ages to copy everything across, but as soon as I turned my computer on for the first time and I didn't have to listen to the clicks and whirs of a mechanical drive, I was completely convinced I'd made the right call to ditch spinning rust.
So. So. There's a deal on, of course, on a blooming massive SATA SSD, and I think there's a good chance that at least one person is in a similar situation to me. This deal is for an 8TB SSD, Samsung's 870 Qvo. It's 40% off, which reduces the price from a shocking £700 to a more reasonable - but still massive - £413.
Here's the link.
Now, the 870 Qvo is the gold standard for "really big solid state drives". It has QLC flash memory, four bits per cell, so it can reach these proposterously high capacities while being (relatively) affordable, at least compared to TLC, three bits per cell, drives. QLC is normally accompanied by a DRAM-less design, but the 870 Qvo does come with a DRAM cache, 8GB in size on the 8TB model, 4GB on the 4TB model and so on. This means that while its longevity isn't quite tip-top compared to more expensive drives, its sustained performance is actually quite strong thanks to that cache. And compared to a hard drive, it's game-changingly fast.
I wouldn't choose this as your only drive in your computer. But as a way to replace your HDDs with clean, sparkling, silent, rapid, perfect SSD storage? With enough capacity to store all your media, all your on-site backups, all your game installs, all your base? It's absolutely perfect. In fact, this 8TB model is cheaper than the 4TB drive I bought a few years back. Crazy stuff, but that's technology for you I suppose.
Anyway, I must be getting to bed. Thanks for reading this ramble, and if you have any questions feel free to write them into that little white box at the bottom of the page. I'll see them, thanks to that whole technology business. See you!