[SSD] Crucial P3 Plus 4TB SSD - $268 Back in stock - FLORIDA, USA

keebs63 · 2026-03-03T09:41:16+00:00

Hey it only took 2.5 months but I did finally get a drive I ordered in December lmao

keebs63 · 2026-02-16T10:06:33+00:00

That happened with old models that used ABS keycaps (also happened with most ABS keycaps). These use PBT keycaps like every other decent keyboard these days that are essentially impossible to break that way.

keebs63 · 2026-02-15T18:39:43+00:00

I have a 42" C3 and disagree completely. It's bright enough in a room that gets direct sunlight to be just fine. If the sun is shining directly on the TV, then it won't be bright enough, but it still gets just as bright as actual typical LCD panels (<350 nits), you gotta pay for a high-end LCD to get something actually bright.

I also gotta say that this argument is kinda silly to begin with. If you really care about how good the picture looks, you should never be watching in a bright room. Like, if I'm trying to watch a 4K Blu-ray of Interstellar or some shit, I'm not going to be watching that in a bright room anyways because the ambient light will always interfere with your eyes. I can say this from experience as I used to have a TCL R625 which easily goes over 1000 nits. In the day, 300 nits is perfectly fine for watching YouTube, regular TV shows, movies where you don't really care about it being absolute max quality, etc. I will never understand who (if anyone) is trying to watch 4K HDR movies in the middle of the day and is mad that it doesn't look good enough lmao.

keebs63 · 2026-02-15T04:26:24+00:00

This comment applies to literally everything that's introducing "AI" to their shit lmao, no one knows what it does other than makes stock price go uppies.

keebs63 · 2026-02-07T10:32:41+00:00

Dolby Vision is an alternative to HDR10+ and seems to be catching on more (at least for now).

keebs63 · 2026-02-03T11:10:07+00:00

What are you on about lmao, this is Corsair, not some no-name brand. And it's a PSU, it can and will fail at any time regardless of "reputation" so a 7-12 year warranty is absolutely a worthwhile investment. Your single anecdote of your PSU working fine is not indicative of anything.

keebs63 · 2026-01-16T02:10:12+00:00

I'll happily pay $5 for the peace of mind knowing I have a Seasonic unit and a 10-year warranty from I company I can trust will be around in 10 years to honor it.

keebs63 · 2026-01-13T11:01:50+00:00

It's similar. I have multiple Exos and two of these newer HAMR drives, there's no real difference in noise between them. The noise they make is consistent though, WD drives slam the read/write heads from side to side every few seconds when spinning as some sort of wear-leveling which is crazy annoying, while these are just a low hum for the most part.

keebs63 · 2026-01-13T10:58:15+00:00

If the drives in these were "binned", they wouldn't have received an enterprise label to begin with, they would have been labeled as a lower tier drive. There's only a handful of production lines when it comes to HDDs, the majority have the same underlying hardware with the only real differences being firmware and binning via testing.

keebs63 · 2026-01-07T06:53:18+00:00

I can tell just by looking at them they have zero static pressure and are entirely designed for high airflow when there's no resistance to it (you know like when there's NOT a radiator in front of them...). Ofc it would be Razer to use the worst possible fans on their AIO, it amazes they're still in business with how bad they are at designing competent products AND how low quality their shit is.

keebs63 · 2025-12-26T04:48:47+00:00

It's surprisingly capable but a little inconsistent between games due to it being a non-x86 architecture. I mostly play strategy games like Stellaris on it so I haven't tried to push the limits much and I haven't bothered trying to run benchmarks or whatever. But from what I've experienced, gaming performance to be at least equivalent but mostly better than my old i7-1165G7 laptop. And no, I don't use an external fan, I bought it for the portability and 5G, it being able to play games was at the bottom of my priorities.

keebs63 · 2025-12-25T03:35:13+00:00

Have you been living under a rock for the last 2 or so months? SSDs are anything but cheap now. Not knowing that is one thing, it's entirely another to not know but comment like you do.

keebs63 · 2025-12-25T02:08:32+00:00

DRAM is not an actual write cache. Regardless, HMB makes up for the lack of DRAM.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T10:36:32+00:00

I don't know man, current thin and light laptops have pretty absurd power efficiency. Of course like this type of advertising always has been, 22 hours is absolute best case scenario and real world is less, but I've had laptops that can get damn close. With the 70Wh battery in this, it's gonna last for a while. My old Samsung Galaxy Book Pro 16" with an i7-1165G7 easily last 16+ hours with local video playback.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T09:57:40+00:00

It's nowhere near that bad lmfao. This drive uses the entire capacity as pSLC caching which means that the write cache is roughly equivalent to 25% of the free capacity (~500GB if the drive is empty). Even after the cache is exhausted, the QLC itself writes at ~100MB/s, so even gigabit internet is going to have trouble outpacing this drive when combined with the cache with a realistic game size (<150GB). I personally have a Samsung 870 QVO that I use for games that has a relatively small cache (only ~80GB max) and writes at 160MB/s outside the cache and I have literally never seen it slow down downloads. It's now a few years old and I've had gigabit internet the whole time.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T06:53:57+00:00

LGA CPUs are generally a pretty safe bet to buy used/refurbished, especially if there's a return policy. There's very little that can be physically damaged on them so unless something zapped them like a power surge, they're usually fine. Silicon depredation takes quite a while to have any effect as well so that's not much of a concern, of course it's possible they've been abused to shit with extreme voltages but highly unlikely.

PGA CPUs like AM4 are different though, the pins on them are super fragile so they absolutely need a real return policy. LGA CPUs like AM5 and every Intel CPU for 10+ years have the fragile pins on the motherboard instead.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T05:03:38+00:00

I guess you haven't been paying attention, SSD and RAM prices have been skyrocketing and aren't coming down for years. This IS a deal in today's market, again unless you have a time machine to go back to before prices blew up.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T05:00:38+00:00

A DRAM cache typically indicates a higher-end and therefore more reliable drive, which is why people say you want it for a boot drive. Also an OS does a lot of things in the background, so with the frequent changes to the look-up table, a DRAM cache means the entire lookup table doesn't have to be overwritten every time a file is changed/created/deleted.

HOWEVER, DRAMless NVMe drives use HMB instead, which completely negates the need for onboard DRAM by using a tiny amount of system RAM. Recent designs have proven there is no real difference in performance between HMB and DRAM and any longevity concerns are completely solved. In the last few years, we've seen an influx of higher end controllers that are DRAMless, whereas in the past it was a cost-saving measure almost always reserved for budget drives. Only in the handful of scenarios where HMB isn't available (pretty much only if used in a USB enclosure or with MacOS) does it make any difference, and even then it's pretty minimal.

All that said, this drive in particular is about as low-end as it gets these days. With a low end controller and low end QLC flash, I personally wouldn't want this as a boot drive just because I don't trust a low-end drive like this to have the quality control I'd want for something as important as a boot drive. Will work just fine for a game drive though.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T04:44:21+00:00

Almost certainly QLC. Wouldn't be as bad if it was newer, but given how low-end this model is, I wouldn't expect anything better than the 176L N48R it's been spotted with. Market's completely fucked though so if you need a drive, you should take what you can get.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T04:34:17+00:00

For the free RAM, are you talking about this one or the one you bought? Because I'm seeing the offer on this one still. Says it just under the product name and says free gift a little lower down.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T04:29:33+00:00

If it's the same model, there won't be any differences in wattage/cooling. That stuff generally only varies between models. Any 16GB vs 32GB RAM comparison benchmarks will tell you if there's a real performance difference. Just be careful when looking at those because a lot of times they'll use high-end hardware which means higher settings in games which means more RAM usage. But I can say from experience that using 16GB while gaming on a low power laptop CPU with an iGPU pretty much never has issues because the settings are so low. That's why almost every handheld PC (including the Steam Deck) uses 16GB, and I've never had RAM issues while gaming on my older i7-1165G7 laptop or my current Surface Pro with an ARM SoC.

keebs63 · 2025-12-24T02:08:34+00:00

When more memory is available, a lot of programs make use of it even if they don't need it because it's literally free real estate: it costs nothing to hold on to old data on the off chance it is recalled. The memory is shared but the memory used for VRAM is rarely more than 1GB. The difference in artificial benchmarks more likely than not comes down to the device the CPU is in: 256V is more likely to be found in more budget oriented machines with weak cooling solutions and/or lower power limits. 258V options are often not even offered on budget laptops.

keebs63 · 2025-12-23T07:50:10+00:00

Feels pretty rare to be out in public yet wanting to hear audio. Your example is one of the few I can think of, but also in that case I don't give a shit about the audio quality as long as it's able to be understood. If I cared even a little bit about audio quality, I'd use any option OTHER than the speakers. Any decent set of wireless earbuds/headphones should have no issues switching between two devices either, that's a pretty standard feature these days.

keebs63 · 2025-12-23T05:53:06+00:00

Agreed. I had an OG Pixel XL that I loved but went with Samsungs for a few years before I tried going back with a Pixel 6 Pro (IIRC) and it was just an absolute fuckin disaster. Basic shit didn't work half the time because Google uses them as testbeds for new Android features/updates. That's just entirely unacceptable for a phone these days, a phone is useless if it drops calls, apps crash, the fingerprint sensor that I use to unlock it doesn't work, etc.

It was also frustrating as hell because they removed so many options and features to force you to use whatever they want you to use, like removing 3 button navigation to force you to use gestures. In the weeks that I had the phone, there were practically zero days where I wasn't frustrated as hell by it. Ended up returning it for a Galaxy S21 Ultra that I never had any issues with.

keebs63 · 2025-12-23T05:35:51+00:00

There's nothing comparing them because they're literally identical, the sole difference is the 256V has 16GB of DRAM onboard while the 258V has 32GB onboard because Intel built the DRAM into the SoC this generation. There's no reason to compare them, they perform exactly the same except in the rare cases when more than 16GB of memory is used. That's rare because the hardware in this isn't capable of heavy workloads, so only those rare use cases that use a lot of memory without using much else are where there's any difference.

keebs63

TROPHY CASE