NVMe drives are some of the best SSDs you can buy, since they offer read and write speeds several times greater than the maximum you can get from traditional SATA drives (around 650 MB/s). Western Digital's 1TB SN550 drive is now on sale for $94.49, a savings of around $36 from the usual price, a value of roughly $0.10 per GB.
This 1TB version of the Western Digital SN550 is an NVMe SSD, so you'll need a PC with at least one M.2 slot and NVMe support in the BIOS. It's rated for sequential read speeds of up to 2,400 MB/s and sequential writes of up to 1,950 MB/s. That's not quite as fast as some premium NVMe drives like the WD Black SN750 or Samsung 970 EVO Plus, but it's still significantly faster than any SATA SSD (and certainly faster than a spinning hard disk). Unless you're doing heavy file operations on a regular basis, you probably wouldn't tell a difference between the SN550 and a more expensive drive.
While we haven't tried out this specific model for ourselves, our friends at Tom's Hardware just gave it 4/5 stars in their review, praising the competitive pricing and 5-year warranty. The site did point out that the small SLC cache does cause extended file operations to slow down, and the blue color might not be everyone's favorite, but it's a solid drive otherwise. The SN550 also earned a 4/5 rating at PC Mag.
