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Seems like Crucial have some new 4TB capacity NVMe m.2 SSD's available for purchase:
- Crucial P3 4TB PCIe Gen 3 - Sequential read/write speeds up to 3500/3000MB/s
- Crucial P3 Plus 4TB PCIe Gen 4 - Sequential read/write speeds up to 5000/4200MB/s
Link to P3 Plus
"Usually dispatched within 4 to 6 weeks"
Also available for $749 and $849 at mwave.
More info here:
https://www.crucial.com/products/ssd/crucial-p3-ssd
https://www.crucial.com/products/ssd/crucial-p3-plus-ssd
They appear to be 'QLC' drives, which is generally regarded to be a bit worse than 'TLC' drives, though I think it is what enables the higher capacity at a cheaper price point. The downsides of 'QLC' seem to be that if you write a large amount of data (tens of gigabytes) at once, the drive can slow down temporarily (until the cache clears itself); it can also slow down if nearly filled up (over 80% capacity). Though the fact that it is 'QLC' doesn't seem to matter much if you're just filling it up with a library of games to play (i.e., reading data). Content creators who constantly copy/paste large 4K video files may want to wait for reviews first or look into 'TLC' drives. It is also probably DRAM-less, though this may not matter as much with the latest generation of NVMe drives/controllers which can get around this limitation and avoid adding DRAM to keep costs down yet still perform well (such as the WD Black SN770). Perhaps someone more knowledgable in these areas can chime in.
Really, the deal here is the high capacity m.2 form-factor NVMe SSD's at a more reasonable price.
The next cheapest I could find is this one (4TB, NVMe, m.2, PCIe Gen 3, QLC) for $696 on sale.
Although these P3 and P3 Plus drives do come in smaller capacities, I'd only be looking at these for the 4TB capacity, as there is better value for money at 2TB at the moment.
Should be a nice improvement/alternative to the old 2.5" Sata SSD's :)
(Cheapest seems to be the Crucial MX500 for $469 - more context here)
Another idea is sticking one of these into a decent m.2 drive enclosure to create a zippy, little, high-capacity portable drive!
Lastly, neither of these meet the PS5 stated SSD requirements in case you were wondering. However, the WD Black SN770 for example, seems to work in the PS5 despite being below the stated requirements. I wouldn't want to be the first to test these out though.
For 4TB P3 Plus: TBW: 800TB
It has an endurance of only about 200 writes, one of the disadvantages of QLC.
The older MX500 is not much better with 1000TBW, but EVO 470 has 2400TBW.
It does not matter for everyone (plus with so many writes, QLC would be painfully slow to use),
but dependent on usage should be taken into account.