Most affordable 1TB SSDs in South Africa

There are many budget solid-state drives (SSDs) available on the market, but often it is better to spend more money not to fall victim to the compromises manufacturers make to bring the cost down.

Adding an SSD is often an excellent upgrade to make your computer feel faster since it can access and read data quicker than conventional mechanical hard drives.

Although SSDs are a major upgrade over mechanical drives, there can be significant differences in how different drives perform based on the hardware it uses.

Before buying a cheap SSD, there are some important factors to consider.

These include if the SSD has a dynamic random access memory (DRAM) cache, its random access read and write speeds, and how many terabytes can be written to the drive before it reaches end-of-life.

The form factor and interface type must also be kept in mind.

These are grouped into two main types: 2.5-inch drives with a Serial AT Attachment (SATA) interface and M.2 drives with a nonvolatile memory express (NVMe) connector.

SATA is slower than NVMe, and each interface regularly undergoes revisions increasing the transfer speeds.

Even though an M.2 SSD can use either NVMe or SATA, product advertisements often use M.2 to imply a drive using NVMe.

According to Techquickie, an SSD accesses and retrieves data stored on its NAND flash memory modules by using a data map to track where the data is physically stored on the drive.

An SSD needs to keep track of the precise locations of data because of a protective measure called wear levelling.

Since an SSD’s lifespan depends on the number of terabytes written (TBW) to its memory cells, wear levelling is a protective measure that moves the data around regularly, ensuring some memory cells do not degrade faster than others.

If an SSD’s data map is kept on a DRAM cache, it can look up the data’s location much more quickly than one without.

Cheap DRAM-less SSDs perform worse because they house the data map on the NAND flash modules, or they copy it over to the computer’s RAM once the system boots up.

When an SSD stores its data map in the computer’s memory, it is Host Memory Buffer (HMB) Enabled.

HMB-enabled SSDs have the added drawback of reducing the overall RAM available for your operating system, which could hurt your PC’s performance.

SSDs that store their data maps on the NAND flash modules will also have a shorter lifespan since there is more overwriting of data.

Figuring out if an SSD has a DRAM cache is not an easy task as not all manufacturers list the feature on their product pages.

For example, Samsung typically lists if an SSD has a DRAM cache, while we couldn’t find it for Kingston’s SSDs.

Other ways to determine if an SSD has a DRAM cache include looking at reviews, teardowns, and user-generated databases, like Johnnylucky.org and NewMaxx’s spreadsheet.

Well-known tech YouTuber Linus Sebastian states that another good way to estimate whether an SSD has a DRAM cache is to look at the warranty — shorter warranties could indicate a DRAM-less SSD.

Manufacturers often boast an SSDs sequential read and write speeds on the product page to encourage customers to buy their product over others.

However, as Sebastian explains in a video, sequential speeds are how fast an SSD can read or write a large file in one contiguous place on the drive.

These speeds are usually only relevant to users who need to move or access a lot of data at once, like video production companies or content creators.

Random read and write speeds more accurately measure how quickly an SSD can deal with smaller chunks of data stored in random locations all over the drive.

Random reads and writes are much more representative of what the average user does from day to day, like saving documents, accessing files, or web browsing.

For those who want a noticeably faster experience than their ageing hard drive, we’ve listed some of the cheapest 2.5-inch SSDs and NVMes available from Wootware and Progenix.

Hikvision E100 1TB 3D NAND SATA 2.5 inch SSD (Evetech) — R1,363.95

Crucial BX500 2.5″ SATA 6Gb/s SSD (Progenix) — R1,540

ADATA Legend 710 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD (Progenix) — R1,569

Western Digital Blue 2.5″ SATA 6Gb/s SSD (Progenix) — R1,653

Kingston NV1 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 NVMe SSD (Progenix) — R1,677

Gigabyte SSD 1TB 2.5″ SATA 6Gb/s SSD (Progenix) — R1,689

Adata ASX6000LNP-1TT-C SX6000 Lite 1TB M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 Solid State Drive (Wootware) — R1,823

Transcend TS1TMTE110S 110S 1TB M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive (Wootware) — R2,035

Samsung MZ-V8V1T0BW 980 1TB NVMe M.2 (2280) PCIe 3.0 x4 Solid State Drive (Wootware) — R2,769

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