But... I've also had some very old Android tablets die on storage that seemed to reprogram flash at EEPROM speeds, never giving up ...before I did. At 2TB for your Steam stash, at least you won't have to swap games in and out as often, which significantly helps to lessen the write burden.

You're chasing speed and capacity: this 2TB drive makes some sacrifices to hit that sort of capacity. A 1TB or smaller drive will usually offer a lot higher write speeds. Generally, we would expect BiCS5 to be less efficient than B47R. In our testing, these drives largely peak at 3-4W when something like the 2TB SN740 is rated for a peak of 6.3W, a substantial difference. Our 2TB SN770 reached a peak of 4.91W, which is noticeably less efficient at 1TB and 2TB. In practice, the difference probably isn’t massive as long as you have a newer controller, though - the TN436’s E19T is objectively much less efficient. Take your large game library wherever you are with up to 2TB 1 of trusted Western Digital TLC NAND storage.Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of (usually) pseudo-SLC programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC or QLC flash. It'd be like making a 5kg washing machine that only works if you put exactly 5kg of clothing in it, if you put 4 or 3 or 2 or 1 kg it just refuses to operate ... These days I just keep running my manual TRIMs when I do major updates and most of my SSDs never go near the 90% mark anyway before I expand or reallocate: prices below €50/TB evict quite a lot of lesser capacity drives natuerally, which interestingly have never gone near 90% remaining life in all those years. Powering off (via a hard switch) in the middle of doing anything can be bad. Most drives limit how much stuff sits in volatile storage (RAM caches) for exactly this reason. High-end drives would have a super capacitor to store power so that they can flush things from RAM to NAND in the event of a power loss. For consumer drives, it's possible, if you cycle the power in the middle of writes, to kill an SSD. Probably very unlikely, and it would depend on the model, but I know in the past I heard of this happening.

Windows and Linux will see just a committed write, turning off the device won't loose you any data, it might just not have the opportunity to do the house-keeping and the SLC cache will remain permanently filled while the drive has to bypass it for new data resulting in HDD class write speeds. At 2TB for your Steam stash, at least you won't have to swap games in and out as often, which signficantly helps to lessen the write burden. We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre storage.The problem there is that a single 2280 m.2 SSD is longer than two 2230 m.2 SSDs, so you wouldn’t be able to have a second m.2 slot unless the aforementioned second slot is past where the 2280 m.2 SSD would normally lay.

It would be interesting to try testing this. Like, a decent SSD and controller should write initially to the pSLC cache, but if it's only at ~40 MB/s, the cache can then be immediately flushed to QLC and would perhaps never fill up (until the SSD is completely full). The problem is that writing even 100GB of data at 40 MB/s takes a while, about 40 minutes. I guess that would be the question: if write speeds are slow, like sub-100 MB/s, do the SSDs even use their pSLC caches, or do they just write straight to TLC/QLC NAND?Yup, it's at that point when you want to start reading the controller's source code. It would be interesting to try testing this. Like, a decent SSD and controller should write initially to the pSLC cache, but if it's only at ~40 MB/s, the cache can then be immediately flushed to QLC and would perhaps never fill up (until the SSD is completely full). The problem is that writing even 100GB of data at 40 MB/s takes a while, about 40 minutes. I guess that would be the question: if write speeds are slow, like sub-100 MB/s, do the SSDs even use their pSLC caches, or do they just write straight to TLC/QLC NAND?But you still need the other screw thread, not near the middle but rather near the other connector, for the case when you use one full-size SSD instead of two half-size. abufrejoval said:I guess the biggest question is: how do you ensure it's done steady-state processing before you turn the device off? Get ready for an immersive experience with exclusive gaming features including PCIe ® Gen 4.0 3, Western Digital's nCache™ 4.0 Technology, and Microsoft’s DirectStorage Support.