5 reasons you maybe shouldn’t buy budget SSDs

When looking for computer parts, it’s natural to look for good deals. Whether you’re looking for a pocketable and portable SSD to store your files between devices or SSD storage for your game library, you want the best value you can find. You might see listings for budget-friendly SSDs that are almost too low to be true, and in some cases, they are.

There are good reasons why we recommend SSDs that we’ve tested, used in our computers at home, or have used other models from the same brands. They use better components, are better tested, and come with better after-sales support in most cases.We also recommend sticking to the big-name stores to purchase them from, as the market for flash-based storage is rife with fakes and clones. Whether it’s USB flash drives, SD cards, or budget SSDs, it’s not worth your time buying anything that seems suspiciously cheap. SSDs have dropped in price in recent years to the point where 2TB of capacity is affordable, even for well-known brands.

5 Lack of DRAM cache

So your SSD will be slower and less durable

One of the biggest cost-cutting measures manufacturers use when making budget SSDs is omitting the DRAM cache. This cache sits as a buffer between the SSD NAND flash cells and your computer’s memory, as a rapid access store while reading and writing data. DRAM is much faster than NAND, so it is more responsive overall, cutting down on things like booting up the operating system or accessing programs.

However, that speed is also more expensive than the storage NAND, making the SSD more expensive. Removing it and replacing it with part of your system memory for the cache is often done on more affordable SSDs, but it’s not supported on all devices and is also not as fast. It’s not a deal-breaker when you’re deciding on a more affordable SSD, however, as the performance hit isn’t always as apparent, especially if you’re transitioning from a hard drive.

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4 Worse performance overall

Depending on your use case, this might not be noticeable

Budget SSDs aren’t made of the best components, so it’s important to know what to expect when using one. SATA SSDs are often suggested as a budget option as they are more affordable. They are several times slower than even the slowest NVMe SSD, but with 550MB/s speeds, they’re still good enough for everyday use or gaming, where a few seconds of loading into a level won’t be that noticeable. Cheaper NVMe drives are still fast, with average speeds of around 3,000MB/s for reads and writes, although random access performance might be slower than the more premium brands.

The key thing here is to know that whatever claims of slower performance you might have read, even budget SSDs are faster than hard drives. You will notice a difference in a good way, when upgrading. It’s just important to know that you won’t be getting the maximum performance numbers that are out there.

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3 Less storage space

Your drive will fill up quickly

All storage options are more budget-friendly at lower capacities, and SSDs are no exception. You can find SSDs of between 240GB and 1TB for very good prices these days, all of which will fit into even the barest of budgets. 500GB of NVMe SSD can be found for under $40 if you wait for a sale, and you’ll get 4,000MB/s read speeds at that price.

What you won’t get on a budget is plenty of space to not worry about having spare capacity. Even base-model MacBooks or Windows laptops nowadays come with 256GB of SSD, and our phones aren’t far behind. The other thing is that when you get close to filling your SSD with data, it will start to slow down slightly. Some SSDs are more so than others, and budget SSDs are the most prone to slowdowns.

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2 Lower endurance

Cheaper price usually means cheaper components

With lower-quality components, budget SSDs aren’t as durable as mainstream or premium models. That might be okay if you go into it knowing this and have a good backup solution in place. Manufacturers just won’t warranty budget parts for as long, so after-sales support might run out sooner than if you’d budgeted for a little more. If you’re only using the cheaper SSDs for cache or other types of data that are important at the time but not afterward, then they can be a good way to save a little on the costs. Otherwise, you’re risking your data to a lower-quality storage medium and either the SSD controller or the NAND could wear out earlier than you wanted it to.

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The boogieman that never comes

1 You might not get what is advertised

Budget external SSDs are often fakes

It’s not just AirPods that get routinely faked. Solid-state storage drives of all descriptions are often copied, cloned, or faked by various means. Some even come in what looks like legit packaging for one of the big names, but the components inside are of low quality or pretend to be something they’re not. Even big box stores aren’t immune to this, and we’ve seen reports of fake SD cards among other devices from big retailers.

While researching, I found a YouTuber who purchased one of these budget SSDs from one of the bigger non-US wholesale sites, and what he found when he opened the casing was unsurprising but still not what you’d want. The big clue here is that nobody reputable is selling 2TB capacity SSDs of any description for $10. While the drive looked like it was 2TB to the system and data copied to it, the internals were made up of a cheap PCB with a micro SD card attached.

Again, there’s no reason to think that there actually was 2TB of capacity because the largest microSD card you can get is 1.5TB, so it had faked firmware to report more capacity to the system. These drives also don’t have any sort of data overwriting protection, so if you start copying data from your computer and it fills up the capacity, it simply keeps on writing new data from the beginning of the drive again. You might as well say goodbye to your photos or documents because no data recovery software is going to work on that.

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Budget SSDs might seem a good deal, but it’s your data that’s at risk

The price for flash storage has plummeted, with NVMe and SATA options being found around the same price per TB. It’s not quite down to hard drive prices (yet), although there’s definitely less of a gap than it used to be, and external drives of either type are around the same. But you have to ask one question if you want to go for even more budget-friendly SSD options–what’s my data worth to me?

The best scenario when buying a budget SSD is that you end up with exactly what you thought you were getting. A slightly slower, slightly less wear-resistant SSD from a brand you might not have seen advertised anywhere else. But you could end up being scammed, with a faked SSD that has nowhere near the capacity you thought, with fraudulent firmware that makes it seem larger to your devices. And that could cost you whatever data you transfer onto it.