Computer Memory Solutions SSD

800 TBW endurance puts this drive in the 96th percentile, which is genuinely impressive for a budget SATA SSD. But the 550 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write speeds are capped by the SATA III interface and land at the 32nd percentile overall. If you're stuck with a SATA M.2 slot, this is a durable pick. If you have NVMe, look elsewhere.

Let's be real about the numbers. 550 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write are SATA III ceiling numbers. You're not getting any faster on this interface, period. Random performance sits at 80K read IOPS and 80K write IOPS, which lands at the 38th percentile overall. That's mediocre by modern standards, but for a SATA drive it's actually fine. Most SATA SSDs cluster right around here.

The MLC NAND is the interesting part. It's why the endurance rating is so high, and it also means performance shouldn't degrade as much as the drive fills up compared to QLC drives. Power draw is modest too, 1.56W max read and 3.01W max write, with a nearly negligible 0.06W idle. For a thin-and-light laptop, that's a good fit.

Stacked against the Samsung 980, this drive gets smoked on speed. The 980 is an NVMe drive with roughly 3x the sequential throughput, and it's often within a few bucks of this price. The Crucial T500 and Corsair MP600 PRO XT are in a completely different league performance-wise, though they cost more. Where the SSDNow holds its own is endurance. 800 TBW beats a lot of drives that are much faster, and the MLC NAND gives it a longevity edge over the TLC-based Samsung 980. If your system only has a SATA M.2 slot, the comparison against NVMe drives is moot anyway, and this becomes one of the more durable SATA options you can actually buy.

At $61 USD from US listings, you're paying about 12 cents per gigabyte. That's not terrible for a 512GB drive, but it's also not exciting when NVMe drives with 3-5x the speed are often within $10-15 of that price. The CAD 142 listing is a different story entirely, and if that's your only option, the value proposition falls apart fast. What you're really paying for here is the endurance. 800 TBW at this price point is genuinely rare, and if you're doing write-heavy work on a SATA-only system, that durability has real value.

The SSDNow CM512GBM2SATA6GBMLCX1 from Computer Memory Solutions is a 512GB M.2 2280 SATA III drive with 550 MB/s sequential reads and 520 MB/s writes. Those numbers put it at the 32nd percentile for speed in our database, which is about what you'd expect from a SATA drive in an NVMe world. But the endurance story is completely different. At 800 TBW, this thing lands in the 96th percentile for endurance, meaning it'll likely outlast most of the systems it gets installed in.

It's built on MLC NAND, which explains the durability. Most budget drives these days use TLC or QLC to cut costs, and while that's fine for everyday use, MLC tends to handle sustained writes better over time. The 3-year warranty and 1,000,000 hour MTBF back that up. This isn't a speed demon, but it's not pretending to be one either.

Skip this if you have an NVMe M.2 slot. The 550 MB/s ceiling is a hard limit, and you'd be leaving massive performance on the table for no real savings. Also skip it if you need more than 512GB of storage, since the capacity sits at just the 33rd percentile. And if you're in Canada looking at that CAD 142 listing, absolutely skip it. That price is hard to justify for a SATA drive when faster NVMe options are available for less.

The SSDNow CM512GBM2SATA6GBMLCX1 is a niche product that knows exactly what it is. If you have an older laptop with a SATA M.2 slot, like the Acer Aspire 5 models it's explicitly compatible with, this is a solid upgrade that'll likely outlive the machine. The 96th percentile endurance rating is the headline here, and the MLC NAND backs it up. But if you have an NVMe slot available, buy an NVMe drive instead. You'll get dramatically better performance for roughly the same money, and the endurance difference won't matter for most people.