It's no secret that big-budget games are getting bigger and bigger. Not just in terms of scope and graphics, but also in terms of how much space each one takes up on your storage drives.
If you tried to store all of last year's big releases on your SSD, you'd need well over 1 TB of free space and if that same drive also plays host to the operating system, you're already looking at a 2 TB drive.
One solution is to put all of your games on a separate drive, but what happens when that runs out of space? Sure you can uninstall what you're not playing but if you're like me, and prefer to play lots of different games at any one time, it's better to keep all local.
The best way to do that is to buy this 4 TB Silicon Power UD90 SSD for $200 at Amazon. I know $200 is a lot of money to throw down on a storage drive but it works out at 4.9 cents per GB. That's equivalent to getting a 1 TB for under $50.
In other words, it's really good value for money. Now, I know what you're thinking: "Cheap price means cheap parts." But that's not the case here, as it uses NAND flash memory chips from Micron and an SSD controller from Phison.
What Silicon Power has done, though, is keep the overall transfer speeds down and not fit the SSD with a DRAM cache. In the case of the former, peak read/write speeds of 5,000 and 4,500 MB/s for a PCIe 4.0 NVMe drive aren't super-fast but it won't make much of a difference with games.
The lack of DRAM really only comes into play when you're downloading and installing a really big game. Silicon Power uses a so-called pseudo-SLC cache on its UD90, where a small portion of the SSD runs faster than the rest and acts as a cache for data writes. It's around 70 GB in size so any data writes bigger than that will slow down once the cache is full.
But again, you'll never notice this in games once they're running. So unless you absolutely must have blazing performance all the time, for all use scenarios, then this Silicon Power UD90 is the perfect way to give your gaming PC a mountain of storage for your Steam library.
And at a cent under $200, it's even cheaper than it was in July's Prime Day sales event.
