Inland, Micro Center’s house or generic SSD brand, has made a name for itself with solid SSDs like the Gaming Performance Plus. It has even had some firsts with the PCIe 5.0 TD510 and the M.2 2230 TN436, and the latter was a popular pick to upgrade launch Steam Decks. Inland is now back with the newer TN446 to improve the formula with a drive you can easily pick up and install into your favorite portable system.

That’s never been easier to do with the growing list of 2230 SSDs on the market, but for those with access to a Micro Center, the TN446 may be especially worthy of interest. It uses TLC flash instead of the QLC on the Sabrent Rocket Q4 2230 and Addlink S91. And while the Rocket 2230 has a 256GB option, the TN436 does not.

The Inland TN436 is a welcome addition to the roster of retail M.2 2230 NVMe SSDs, perfect for upgrading the internal storage of your Steam Deck or ASUS ROG Ally. It joins a growing list of options with enough competition to drive prices down to reasonable levels. It has Inland’s typical six-year warranty, which is nice, but it lacks a software management suite. Luckily, there are free applications available. The drive performs well enough and efficiently enough to be a good choice if it’s priced right, and it’s particularly attractive at the 512GB capacity point.

The Seagate FireCuda is a mechanical hard drive done right, providing expected performance and being backed by Seagate’s excellent warranty. Seagate didn’t compromise with this design, using high-performance CMR technology paired with a 7200 RPM spindle speed. It also offers the sweet spot of 8TB of capacity at a reasonable price per TB, making it perfect for general desktop use. There are reasons to drop down to 5400/5640 RPM if you have concerns about cost, heat, and noise, and that’s where the 8TB WD Blue would come in. However, the FireCuda offers the best all-around package available at this time.

Seagate hasn’t had the best reputation for HDD reliability in the past, but it’s difficult to find fault with its warranty. The Seagate FireCuda has the standard five-year warranty that includes Seagate’s three-year Rescue Data Recovery Services, which guarantees one attempt at data recovery (Seagate claims a relatively good 90% track record for recoveries). Seagate also provides software to cover the most common storage processes, which makes the FireCuda a drop-in solution. It’s not the fastest drive on the market, but its performance is more than adequate for use as general storage. Its biggest shortcoming is perhaps that it’s not offered in larger capacities.

The Seagate FireCuda 540 is a fast, reliable PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD that sets itself apart with an excellent warranty. The FireCuda’s performance is also good to excellent across the board, including in sustained workloads, which helps gear this drive for future DirectStorage game titles. It requires a PCIe 5.0-capable motherboard to take full advantage, particularly one with built-in M.2 cooling as the drive arrives bare, and pricing is also on the high end. Seagate’s attention to detail on this drive makes it a good fit for workstations, too, if you can apply your own cooling.

The initial instinct is to compare the FireCuda 540 to the Corsair MP700, a drive that shares the same hardware and also goes with the bare-drive approach. The E26’s reference heatsink, used on the Inland TD510, comes with a small fan for active cooling that’s annoying to power, noisy, and generally useless, so doing away with that is a good plan. It also makes sense to let the user decide how to cool the drive, as matching aesthetics is important with high-end machines. Having a different option, as does the Crucial T700 and Gigabyte Aorus 10000, is viable, but Seagate wanted something simple with this drive.

In my opinion, that works in Seagate’s favor. The three-year data recovery service is an excellent addition that sets it apart from the MP700. The TD510 has an extra year of warranty, but the FireCuda 540 compensates with a higher TBW endurance rating. This drive avoids risk by using the standard pSLC caching configuration, but attention is also paid to flash quality, including mitigating the possibility of counterfeit hardware. It manages to differentiate itself in a challenging space by focusing on what Seagate does right, and the fingerprints on it suggest the company’s experience in enterprise played a role.

However, these benefits come at a cost. The recovery service and higher TBW come with an elevated price tag. The TBW rating, in particular, may seem outlandishly high, but FireCuda drives historically have been excellent for write caching. The conservative pSLC cache design helps with that type of workload, too. The drive also supports hardware encryption which is often lacking in consumer products. Overall, these deviations help separate the FireCuda 540 sufficiently from the pack, but you have to judge whether or not it’s worth the price premium to get an added bit of security.

The Crucial T700 sets a new bar in performance for consumer SSDs, pushing speed higher than any other PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive on the market. It reigns as the king of the hill for sequential bandwidth and random IOPS, at least for now. Its native DirectStorage firmware optimization is an added benefit over almost all PCIe 4.0 SSDs for future gaming, as well. Crucial departs from the reference heatsink design with its own effective solution while also offering a cheaper, bare-drive variant for easier installation with motherboard and custom M.2 heatsinks. Together, this makes it a nice option for enthusiasts and early adopters.

The T700 is part of a wave of PCIe 5.0 SSDs about to deluge the consumer SSD market, all so far based on the same Phison E26 controller and Micron flash. This puts pressure on the manufacturers to differentiate their products in other ways, particularly with cooling. This could bring some innovation to the market, but current industry trends have created lingering concerns about the future of NAND that could eventually reduce the buyer’s pricing advantage from such competition.

Competing controllers are also on the way with InnoGrit’s IG5666 and SMI’s SM2508, and flash of the 232-Layer generation should be in wider production from Micron and other manufacturers. Faster drives based on the Phison E26 SSD Controller have also been announced offering up to 14 GBps, so early drives like the T700 have a limited window to shine. We’ll know more after Computex, which is currently underway, but many of these drives won’t be available until later in the year.