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This 2TB PCIe 3.0 SSD is down to £63 - ideal for maxing out your game or media storage

Fanxiang's S500 Pro comes with TLC NAND, unlike many budget drives.

Reece Bithrey avatar
Deals by Reece Bithrey Contributor
Published on

While many of the best gaming SSDs are fast PCIe 4.0 options, it's worth considering last-gen PCIe 3.0 models as these can offer the same capacity and fast-enough speeds at a much lower price. One example is this Fanxiang S500 Pro, a 2TB TLC drive that costs just £63 at Amazon. That's a huge amount of storage for the money - in fact, just 3p per gigabyte, which is almost unheard-of for an NVMe SSD of this size.

While this is a PCIe 3.0 model rather than the newer PCIe 4.0 or 5.0, the S500 Pro still offers some snappy speeds - including up to 3500MB/s reads and 3000MB/s writes, making it one of the quicker PCIe 3.0 SSDs available. Intriguingly, it actually eclipses budget PCIe 4.0 options such as the Kingston NV2, thanks to its use of TLC NAND rather than QLC. Its random performance isn't listed, but other sources online suggest results in the 300K to 400K IOPS region - which would put it significantly ahead of SATA SSDs and comparable to other good PCIe 3.0 options from the likes of Samsung and Crucial.

The fact also remains that you'll be getting 2TB of storage here, giving you a lot of space in which to store games, videos, music or other forms of media, as well as apps as well. Adding the S500 Pro Plus into your system may just give you that little bit extra in terms of peace of mind for adding extra storage to your system and some needed capacity, especially if, like me, you've got a large collection of digital media you'd like especially quick access to.

Installation is also easy, with the drive slotting into a free M.2 NVMe slot - including more modern PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 ports on newer motherboards and laptops. As this is a PCIe 3.0 drive, it's also compatible with a larger array of PCs compared to newer PCIe 4.0 drives. This means that you can use the the S500 Pro for anything from adding in storage affordably to more modern systems to giving older ones a much needed speed boost.

The Fanxiang S500 Pro looks to be a decent performer for the price, and if you're after some especially affordable NVMe storage for a wide range of PCs for rather reasonable money, then this is well worth a look.

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