CamelCamelCamel
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After seeing a deal for a Seagate 2 TB SSD posted yesterday for under $400 delivered, I did a little research. The Seagates use a 4 year old controller and is mediocre in benchmarks and power consumption tets, except for sequential read tests. The Samsung 860 Evo seems to have the best overall results of the cheaper TLC equipped SATA drivers. According to CamelCamel, The 860 Samsung drivers have been falling in price over time and were their lowest during the Black Friday period, at $295 USD (they are now $300 USD).
The listing I am posting is for a drive with a 2.5inch form factor. The cheapest retailers in Australia are selling this drive for $509 AU without shipping, so Amazon is about 20% cheaper. The 1 TB version of the 860 Evo is exactly half the price: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-Inch-Internal-MZ-76E2T0B-AM/d… . There is a 4TB version too but it is still very expensive. Also, the 860 Pro series is much more expensive because it has MLC, and in a lot of benchamarks there is little difference in performance between the 2 (MLC has greater longevity though).
If you want an 860 Evo in a M.2 form factor, look here: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-860-SATA-Internal-MZ-N6E2T0BW…
The price is $298 USD, $2 less than the 2.5 inch version, though performance is likely the same since it uses bottlenecked SATA rather than the newer NVME standard. If you have a newer motherboard with NVME support, DON'T purchase the new Samsung 970 Evo from Amazon. It is about 25% cheaper to buy it from a local retailer like MSY or MWave or UMart ($289 for a 1TB model, $639 for a 2TB).
I hope my research results are of value to somebody.
Mod Note: Price in title updated with GST.
I purchased 2TB 970 evo m2 nvme from computer alliance through Ebay for 594aud during ebay 10% off and with cashback of 167 the final price will be 427. The current cashback promo makes them very reasonable here. I did not post it here as there was only one in stock that I purchased.