BIOSTAR M700, PCIe SSD At Ten Cents Per Gig, If You Can Find One
Do You Give A DRAM With A Price Like This?
Biostar recently launched their M700 line of cacheless NVMe SSDs with a price that falls within the demanding specifications of Ryan’s law. Performance-wise it suffers the same Achilles Heel of similar drives and once the SLC cache is exhausted your writes fall spectacularly, and if you habitually write more than 62GB at a time this might not be the best choice. For most, that will be more than enough cache and you will never notice the slow down, only the speed of PCIe 3.0 NVMe power.
The one big downfall is availability, TechPowerUp was quoted an MSRP of $50 for the 512GB model but as of now we don’t know if that will indeed be the price at which it is available at retail. If it is anywhere close, this may drive the price of the competition such as the ADATA SX6000 Pro or Intel’s 760p down to match the BioStar, which is a definite win for the consumer.
With just $50 for the tested 512 GB model, the BIOSTAR M700 M.2 NVMe SSD is the most affordable SSD we ever reviewed, even cheaper than most 2.5" SATA drives. Thanks to its fast PCIe x4 3.0 interface paired with a SMI controller, performance is good too. Is there any reason left to buy a 2.5" SATA SSD?
Unless your machine can’t take M.2 drives, there hasn’t been a reason to buy a SATA SSD for over a year.
Life moves so fast, sometimes it’s nice to use a slow drive instead. Blink and you’ll miss the OS startup. Waiting on the OS builds character! These kids and their “NVMe” don’t appreciate the world around them. And by the world around them I mean SATA SSDs, I guess.
I have a 5.25″ full height 3600 RPM SCSI drive waiting for your next OS install. 🙂