It's no secret, big-budget video games are getting bigger. Not only in terms scope and graphics but also how much space they take up on your storage drive.
If you wanted to store all the big releases from last year on your SSD drive, you would need more than 1 TB. If that same drive is also used to host the operating system, then you are already looking at 2 TB.
If you put all your games on separate drives, what happens if runs out of space? You can uninstall the games you are not playing, but if you like me and play many different games at once, it is better to keep them all locally.
This 4 TB Silicon Power SSD UD90 is available at Amazon for just $200. I know that $200 is a lot to spend on a storage device, but it comes out to 4.9 cents per gigabyte. This is the equivalent of getting a 1TB drive for less than $50.
It's a great value for money. You're probably thinking, "Cheap prices mean cheap parts." This is not the case, as it uses NAND memory chips from Micron along with an SSD controller by Phison.
Silicon Power has kept the SSD's transfer speeds low and did not include a DRAM caching system. In the case where the SSD is PCIe 4.0, the peak read/write speed of 5,000 MB/s and 4,500 MB/s are not super-fast, but they won't make a big difference in games.
The lack of DRAM is only noticeable when you are downloading and installing an extremely large game. Silicon Power's UD90 uses a pseudo-SLC cache, where a smaller portion of the SSD is faster than the rest. This acts as a data cache. The cache is around 70 GB, so data writes larger than that will slow when the cache fills up.
You won't notice it in the games once they are running. If you don't need to have blazing-fast performance in all scenarios, the Silicon Power UD90 will give your gaming computer a mountainous amount of storage space for your Steam library.
It's also cheaper than the Prime Day event in July.
Interesting news
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