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It’s rare to see big discounts on high capacity SSDs, especially when the SSDs in question are also super-fast PCIe 4.0 models – but that’s exactly what’s happening for today only over at Amazon. PNY’s XLR CS3040, a model compatible with both PC and PS5, has been discounted $230 for a massive 4TB size. That cuts the price of the drive down from a whopping $750 to a still significant (but much more reasonable) $520, a 31% discount.
The XLR8 CS3040 doesn’t have the most evocative name ever, so let’s just cover the basics. It’s a PCIe 4.0 drive that uses 4TB of QLC NAND flash memory, backed with a DRAM cache for better performance. It uses the Phison E16 controller, a trusty choice, and typical of first-gen PCIe 4.0 drives. The 4TB model is rated for a maximum read speed of 5600MB/s, with write speeds being a respectable 3900MB/s. Overall, you’d expect better performance and endurance from an equivalent TLC drive, but you’d also pay way more – Sabrent’s Rocket 4 Plus in this size costs $900 (!), a sale price from its normal $1000 (!!), so $520 is an absolute steal.
Given its attributes, the CS3040 is best used as super-fast game storage or for creative work, where its fast sequential read and write speeds make dealing with large files (like 4K videos or game assets) a much more pleasant experience than on SATA SSDs that are limited to just 550MB/s – that’s around a tenth of the maximum speed of the CS3040.
Time for some quick mental maths. A Call of Duty Warzone install is around 250GB, right, and it’s probably the biggest game we’re likely to see in the immediate future. You could fit four of those into a terabyte*, and we have four terabytes to play with – so you could get perhaps 16 simultaneous installs going. “Normal” games are more likely to be in the 40 to 80GB region; if we assume a figure right in the centre of that, we’d be able to fit about four times as many games – so say 64 titles in all. And of course, many games outside of AAA, back-compat titles or simply more space-efficient games might only require 10 or 20GB of space. So if those sorts of games are more your jam, then you could have anywhere from 192 to 384 games installed at once. I can fill up a 1TB drive pretty quickly just by installing the games I like to have installed and ready to go to play with friends, but 2TB requires far less careful management – and 4TB is on a whole ‘nother level!
*Yes, I know, a 4TB drive won’t have exactly 4TB of usable space – but Warzone is a little less than 250GB these days, so I think the arithmetic is still in the right ballpark at least!
The CS3040 is a well-reviewed PCIe 4.0 SSD, and this 4TB size is a pretty awesome bargain. If you hate playing SSD tetris, always deleting and redownloading games to fit the new ones, this is the drive for you. Just remember to pick it up tonight, as this deal expires at midnight.
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