The cheapest 4TB PCIe 4.0 SSD on Amazon has been tested ahead of Prime Day — and it reveals a worrying trend
It seems too good to be true to get your hands on a 4TB SSD for just $158, but that’s exactly what you get with the FanXiang S660, a high-capacity, low-cost NVMe PCIe 4.0 M.2 SSD.
Amazon Prime Day starts on October 10, with some of the best SSDs and fastest hard drives likely to be available at low prices.
At 4TB, the S660 is one of the largest consumer-grade SSDs you’ll find – and also the cheapest: $158. It is certainly the most economical in terms of pure dollars per GB. Just prepare for seriously slow performance, according to tests from Serve the House.
The cheapest and largest SSD on the market
The price makes the FanXiang S660 4TB the cheapest PCIe 4.0 4TB SSD on the market right now, beating the Silicon Power 4TB UD90 SSD by just $5. But these two are emblematic of a broader trend of cheaper, high-capacity SSDs that are just not meeting expectations, with a nosedive in performance.
The fastest SSDs out there, including the Samsung 980 Pro, are usually only sold in variants up to 2TB, and they generally achieve read/write speeds of 7,000 MB/s. This applies to the Samsung for read operations, with write speeds of around 5,000 MB/s.
The fastest 4TB SSD we’ve seen so far is the Crucial T700, which achieved read speeds of 12,400 MB/s and write speeds of 11,800 MB/s. But this will cost you $529.99 on Amazon at the time of writing.
The S660 4TB, on the other hand, achieved a read speed of 5,057 MB/s – not bad – but a write speed of only 406 MB/s, which is awful for an SSD. Serve the Home achieved these results on CrystalDiskMark.
The site confirmed this with additional results in ATTO – another benchmarking software. Here the S660 reaches a speed of 6,738 MB/s, but writes a terrible 365 MB/s. What’s worse, in further testing, the write speed drops to 180MB/s when the drive is at 85% capacity.
As you browse Prime Day on October 10 and 11, it’s important to be on the lookout for how these drives perform in test and real-world contexts – check out our guide to the best cheap SSD deals to ensure you get the best value and performance.