Grab this excellent Crucial P3 1TB NVMe SSD for just £44 from Amazon
A great price on a capable PCIe 3.0 SSD.
We're in a state of continual amazement about NVMe SSD prices, as drives that we've come to know and love have become increasingly affordable options. Take the Crucial P3 1TB, for instance, a solid PCIe 3.0 drive that's now selling for just £44 - nearly half off its original price.
That's quite a ridiculous price on what is a capable PCIe 3.0 drive. Doing the maths, it works out to you paying 4.4p per GB. That's one of the lowest prices I've seen for any form of solid state storage, let alone an NVMe drive like the P3. For the price, you're getting an SSD that's one of the fastest PCIe 3.0 drives available. Its quoted read speeds of 3500MB/s mean it offers performance that's even comparable to more affordable PCIe Gen 4 drives such as the Kingston NV2 I've covered before. The random performance offered up by the P3 is also impressive, at 650K/700K for reads and writes. This means it'll be especially snappy in tasks such as loading games up.
1TB of space is enough to make the P3 a handy boot drive, as well as for storing files you want quick and easy access to, given it's a lot quicker than both SATA SSDs and mechanical hard drives by a fair margin. For reference, the fastest SATA SSDs can hit 500-550MB/s at their quickest, whch is six times slower than the P3, while hard drives are significantly slower again. Moreover, as this is a PCie 3.0 drive, it'll also work with a vast range of motherboards and laptops, given the hardware standard has been around for longer than PCIe 4.0. As a result, it makes the P3 an excellent choice for speeding up an older system or simply adding more storage to an existing system on the cheap, given the more modern PCIe standards are backwards compatible. While the P3 may not be up there with some of the best gaming SSDs on the point of performance, it's still more than capable for what you'll likely be using it for.
If you are upgrading from an older mechanical hard drive, it's also handy to know that the P3 is going to be an inherently more reliable drive than its HDD counterparts. This is especially given that solid state storage features no moving parts, meaning that there is inherently less to go wrong. If it's any further proof of the P3's reliability, Crucial quotes it to have an MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1.5 million hours. That's roughly equivalent to 171 years, meaning you're likely to give out before the drive does, and is just there to give you extra peace of mind about the reliability of the P3.
£44 is an insane price for solid state storage of any kind, not least a drive as speedy and reliable as the Crucial P3. If you're someone who is in need of a storage upgrade on the cheap, this is definitely the deal for you.