Samsung's 2TB 870 Evo SSD is down to £197.50 at Amazon
A good price for our top SATA SSD pick for gaming.
We reckon that Samsung's 870 Evo is the best SATA SSD for gaming, and today the mammoth 2TB model has been reduced on Amazon. It's now retailing for £197.50, the best price we've seen on this drive since the Chia mining craze began and some £45 below RRP. It's even cheaper than the (older and slower) 860 Evo. Here's a link to the deal and a few more words on why we like this particular drive so very much.
The 870 Evo ranks as one of the very fastest SATA SSDs on the market with read speeds of up to 560MB/s and write speeds of up to 530MB/s - right at the limit of what the SATA interface is capable of. This is matched with excellent random read and write performance from the drive's TLC NAND memory, resulting in game loading times that are very similar to more expensive NVMe SSD drives and way faster than you'd expect from even the most performant hard drives.
Katharine's 870 Evo review is well worth reading to get a sense of the drive's place in the market, but the main jist of the piece is that this SATA drive is only really under threat from cheap NVMe drives which offer higher sequential speeds and similar random speeds, like the WD Blue SN550 or Crucial P2. These are great alternatives if you have a free NVMe slot, but with only one or two slots available on many desktop PCs you may find it necessary to supplement NVMe storage with SATA drives like the 870 Evo, which generally can be connected in much higher numbers as they don't take up physical space on the board and require less bandwidth.
So, if you're after cheap game storage and an NVMe drive isn't an option, this is a great price.
Stay tuned for more Samsung deals in the near future, as we cover some excellent Samsung monitor deals that make it very tempting to upgrade to a new high-spec display. Until then, keep your stick on the ice!