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It’s hard to describe any SSD these days as “budget,” but you will currently save quite a few bucks with this DRAM-less (HMB/Host Memory Buffer) design. Once available at 2TB for $150, that drive is now $285. Thanks, OpenAI. That said, the SN5100, now remonikered as the SanDisk Optimus 5100, is still available which can’t be said for a lot of the competition. The WD Blue SN5100 is the successor to our former bargain pick — the WD Blue SN5000. The newer drive does better in most tests, most markedly in sustained/sequential throughput. At the moment, the pricing is exactly the same, so we say go

Those looking for top sequential performance for a bit less money should be all over the WD Black SN7100, which is still available under that name but will be sold as the SanDisk Optimux GX 7100 going forward. (SanDisk was acquired, then recently divested by WD.) We were wowed by the 2TB SN7100’s host memory buffer (HMB) performance, though it was supplanted as number one by an extremely narrow margin by the Lexar Play 2280. However, unlike the latter, we were still able to find the Black SN7100 for sale online at the time of this writing, hence it’s our best of pick.

The WD Blue SN5100, successor to the SN5000, is a 2280 (22mm wide, 80mm long) NVMe 2.0, PCIe 4.0 SSD utilizing a Sandisk controller and 332-layer Sandisk BiCS8 QLC NAND. It’s also single-sided so the SSD will fit in just about any 2280 NVMe-capable device. QLC stands for Quad-Layer Cell (4-bit), which typically performs as well as other NAND until you exhaust secondary cache (QLC written as SLC to be later written as QLC) during long writes. In the case of newer QLC, it’s not quite as tragic as with older versions — sustained transfers drop only to SATA SSD levels, not 2.5-inch SATA HDD levels