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Dynamic

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#324899 10-Jun-2026 08:38
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We've got a number of SSDs that were pulled from retired office computers.  I think we've got around a dozen available.  As we have a steady supply that comes in over time so anyone finding this post in a year is welcome to contact us to ask if pricing below is still valid.

 

$50 per 240Gb /250Gb / 256Gb M.2 NVME (Gen3 or Gen4) drive shipped nationwide, and $40 per additional drive purchased at the same time.  (Double the price for a 480Gb / 500Gb / 512Gb drive, though quantities of these are limited.)  We also have 2.5" SATA SSDs available.

 

Conditions:

 

  • We're not a retailer and we're not well set up to sell parts to the community.  Our motivation is to make these available as a favour to our favourite online community, to reduce our e-waste footprint, and to recover the costs of our team to securely erase any data on the drives before they are dispatched.
  • Drive selection will be random and shipping may take up to 3 business days while we securely erase the drive before shipping.
  • 3 month warranty.
  • For a warranty claim, return is not required but you must send a photo of the unit physically snapped or the pins cut off before we'll ship a replacement.  Please arrange proper e-waste recycling of the faulty unit.
  • If you health-check the drive and find less than 80% remaining life, we'll consider that a valid warranty claim or will refund you $20 if you're happy to keep the drive.




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caffynz
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  #3501764 10-Jun-2026 12:00
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Would these be any good for saving Steam games onto, and playing? I might be needing more storage for my ever-growing collection of games on the go at one time! :D 




Dynamic

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  #3501771 10-Jun-2026 12:21
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That's a little bit of a 'how long is a piece of string' question.  The NVME SSDs are much faster than a traditional mechanical hard drive, and notably faster than a SATA SSD.  If your desktop computer does not have a spare NVME slot, a PCIe card can be purchased to give you an extra NVME M.2 slot.  One inexpensive example of this sort of adapter is the UGREEN UG-30715





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cshaun
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  #3501772 10-Jun-2026 12:22
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caffynz:

 

Would these be any good for saving Steam games onto, and playing? I might be needing more storage for my ever-growing collection of games on the go at one time! :D 



In short: yes fine.

NVME SSD > SATA SSD > SATA HD.

But where it really matters is for your boot drive, Windows handles millions of tiny random files constantly, where NVMe's low latency shines. Games mostly do large sequential reads, where the real-world gap between SATA and NVMe narrows significantly.
Pretty minor difference between SATA SSD and NVME SSD for gaming. Comes largely down to cost, form factor, drive capacity for your particular use case.

The exception:
Modern titles utilizing Microsoft's DirectStorage (like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Ghost of Tsushima, or Death Stranding 2) bypass the CPU entirely to decompress assets directly on the GPU. In these specific games, an NVMe drive can reduce load times down to literal seconds and allow instantaneous level transitions that a SATA SSD can't quite match.

Note:
Only other thing to be aware of is if the drive you're buying is QLC (Quad-Level Cell), compared to most drives that are TLC (Triple-Level Cell).
It's fine for a drive used mostly for reading (not your boot drive). They're cheaper, but you need to be aware of their specific use case. A QLC SSD makes an excellent, budget-friendly secondary drive exclusively for a Steam library or media storage. Once the game is installed, it will load just as fast as an expensive TLC drive.




Handle9
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  #3501774 10-Jun-2026 12:38
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This is an extremely generous gesture to the community. 


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