Silicon Power SSD 512GB 3D NAND A55 SLC Cache Performance Boost 2.5 inch SATA III 7mm (0.28") Internal Solid State Drive

Good budget SSD that gets the job done with decent sata speeds as expected. Was easy to install as someone who knows how to already but came with instructions for those less experienced which is always nice.

So if (a couple of years ago) you had told me that a half terabyte SSD would be less than the (then) price of the same size hhd i wouldn't have believed you. Zoom forward to today and often, the even faster m.2 nvme drives are cheaper still on a per gb basis. However for builds such as the updating and speeding up of both my HP enterprize z600/z800 builds which wont easily boot from nvme, and (for the same reasons) my updated Mac Pro a1186 builds for music studios, these are the perfect addition. Faster than any given hdd, and with using it in older sata 2 systems, it will run as fast as the system underneath can chew through data. What i will mention is that, although i was initially nervous as to using a dram cacheless drive after previous issues with older equivalents from other brands, i can confidently report that the tiered nand flash approach that this drive uses is perfectly suited for the application and plenty fast. It uses a smaller and lighting fast single layer nand flash cache, (exactly as a dram cache would be utilised, but in many cases significantly faster than the old and slow ddr3 used) it then moves the data archived onto the still fast but less-so qlc nand which is the size of the drives headline capacity to store. Again at the £44 i paid this is a no brainer. Good quality, great price and no issues and all testing using crystal tools reports at least advertised speed on a fast top end HEDT platform and in some cases its actually run faster than advertised.

Bought one a while back, for my XBox One as needed more storage. SSD maybe a little wasted on those, but was cheap enough and I was curious - worked great, and maybe a little snappier? Bought another couple days back for my PS4 Pro, as it was a broken console bought without storage. Much snappier in this due to it having a faster interface for the drive, really nice reduction in boot/load times. In both cases the drive installed flawlessly, a little more involved in the XBox because you have to format that separately before physically installing - but that's Microsoft's fault, not the drives. PS4 you just plug it in (one screw to access!) And switch the console on with the Sony update file plugged in on a USB - it does all the setup in-console. Both working superb!

Decent cheap ssd no noise pug and play super easy to use made of a weak plastic

Been using it for a couple years now as external storage, working perfectly fine no issues to this day with pretty heavy use.

We have a couple of these drives now for use as secondary storage for game installs on gaming laptops. The first one was bought a couple of years ago, the second recently, and overall they offer very good value for money as secondary storage. They're a QLC NAND based DRAM-less SSD. That means write speeds are dependent on whether or not you fill the SLC cache in a copy operation, which in turn depends on the remaining capacity as it treats some of the unused QLC as SLC. Using Macrium Reflect to copy the partition from the old HDD was a bit slow, around 50Mb/s for the 123Gb of data. However, copying 2 large datasets of 50Gb and then immediately another 80Gb ran at 200-400Mb/s for the most part for the large files in each, with occasional drops below 100Mb/s. This is more than acceptably quick given the low price. I wouldn't use cheaper QLC as a main boot drive, but as secondary storage for large game installs there's nothing wrong with it. Once installed most games have lots of reads and relatively few and small writes. My only gripe is the screw fittings. I had to use a Dremel to shorten the old HDD mounting screws by 1-2mm to get the tray to slide into the laptop mounting bay. For some reason when using the side mounting holes the screws catch and jam on the underside mounting threads, which as the photo shows wasn't the case with the older HDD. I only had this issue with 1 laptop and drive, it was annoying but doable.

At first this SSD works passably; the data transfer speed wasn't quite what was advertised but after adding it to an aging laptop to replace a failing spinning HDD it did improve its startup time. I bought the 512 GB model in May 2024, and it spontaneously suffered a total failure in September. The laptop would not start up, and despite plugging it into multiple other machines and even a dedicated drive recovery unit, nothing could even tell it was an SSD. This listing, the product packaging, and the Silicon Power website all mention a 3 year warranty. Attempting to make use of this warranty is a miserable experience. The website's primary phone number is in Taiwan and the alternative has no international code provided but appears to be based in the USA. The product packaging has two more phone numbers in the Netherlands (which I tried calling and did not pick up) and Japan. There is also a website support form, but responses are very delayed and not very helpful. In summary: The options to return this £26 item are to ship it to the Netherlands (costing about £10) or Taiwan (a little more). Moreover, you need to fill out an "RMA application form" first, and they only accept returns with tracking or express delivery services. Apparently shipping costs can be repaid, but the process of applying for that repayment has not been explained. Perhaps most absurd though, I am informed: "Silicon Power will inspect the product and in its sole discretion repair or replace it with a comparable one based on the warranty policy." This implies they may simply claim the product is damaged and refuse to fulfil the warranty at all, probably also refusing to reimburse shipping costs in the process. Even if they do accept the product is faulty, there is no option to refund, only to receive another product which is just as likely to be faulty. Throughout this experience I am left with the impression that the business model is to sell cheaply-produced products that barely last beyond Amazon's standard warranty, while claiming to offer a longer warranty that has so many barricades that few to no customers will ever manage to make use of it. I strongly advise anyone considering these SSDs to reconsider. Rather than the low cost of an SSD, think about the cost of the data you intend to store on it; that is what you will really pay if and when it fails.

very good product