GameStop NVMe SSD 2TB SSD Review: A surprisingly capable budget drive for the PS5

When we think of GameStop, we don’t exactly think SSD. However, the company has released a PS5-friendly NVMe SSD “Card” that’s surprisingly capable. The heatsink is aesthetically pleasing, and the prices are good at all capacities. That’s almost too good to be true – what’s really behind this unusually marketed drive? Have any corners been cut to make this work?

We’re pleased to say the GameStop NVMe SSD is actually a pretty good bargain. Our testing revealed no unpleasant surprises, and the drive, on the whole, is a pretty good budget pick. Performance is good, power efficiency is acceptable for use in a laptop sans heatsink, and the hardware is surprisingly good. We’re not seeing any weird SSD controllers or flash here – just a reliable controller from Silicon Motion paired with Samsung flash. The heatsink is capable and PS5-compliant, so no complaints there. The only thing that might make you hesitate is the lack of hard specifications for the drive. However, in our testing, it meets our expectations, and this drive is backed by a known company. So far, so good. Let’s get into it.

GameStop NVMe SSD Specifications

The GameStop NVMe SSD Card, or just NVMe SSD, was originally intended to be available only at 1TB and 2TB. Currently, there is also a 4TB version. These are priced at $175.74, $237.49, and $427.49 at the time of review. The 1TB price isn’t bad, being priced a bit above the Crucial P310, the Kingston NV3, and the Biwin Black Opal NV7400. Considering this drive has a heatsink and TLC flash, it should be more than a match for any of those three. The price at 2TB has no competition at the moment, and the same goes for 4TB, for that matter. It’s a pretty good deal if you’re willing to go through GameStop for an SSD.

Specifications on the drive have limited availability. It’s rated for up to 7,400 / 6,400 MB/s, but no random read and write IOPS numbers are given. It should be able to hit 1 million IOPS or more, if that matters to you. The warranty should be good for the standard five years, but this is not clearly indicated, plus we don’t have TBW endurance information. This is a red flag for some, but we would expect the drive to be covered for the normal 600TBW per TB. This drive is manufactured in Taiwan, which has us thinking about Nextorage, but of course, that would have a Phison controller, which our sample does not, but it should be treated about the same. The lack of TBW and warranty information would be most concerning to heavier users who want to use this drive for workstation tasks, and we cannot recommend this drive for that use case.

GameStop NVMe SSD Software and Accessories

With limited direct support, we have to recommend third-party utilities for drive management. We recommend CrystalDiskInfo for general drive information. For cloning and data backup, check out MultiDrive for Windows and Clonezilla for everything else. While not having official software can suck, it’s usually not a big deal in our experience. If you are someone who wants firmware updates, you might want to look elsewhere, though.

GameStop NVMe SSD: A Closer Look

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The GameStop NVMe SSD is a very simple, single-sided drive. This is a good thing in our book. It’s designed to fit perfectly into the PS5, but you can remove the heatsink for use in a laptop or any system that can fit an M.2 2280 form factor SSD. The heatsink is nothing to write home about, but it should be sufficient to keep the drive cool.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Arrayed here we have an SSD controller and four NAND flash packages. The controller is the Silicon Motion SM2268XT2, which we first tested with the Kingston NV3. It’s the counterpart to Phison’s E27T controller, which is used to good effect in drives like the Crucial P310. These are four-channel, DRAM-less controllers capable of making the most of a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot. Generally speaking, the GameStop SSD should be a good compromise if you’re shooting between higher-end DRAM-equipped drives and low-end drives.

The flash here is a bit of a mystery at first glance. Upon closer inspection, we found that this is a Samsung V8 flash, or 236-Layer TLC. This flash first showed up on the 4TB Samsung 990 Pro and was later backported to the smaller SKUs. The 990 EVO Plus, an excellent laptop drive, also uses this flash. The use of Samsung flash is certainly unusual, but it is probably more common than you’d think. It’s possible that this is lower-grade flash, but in terms of endurance, it’s going to be more than sufficient to compete with other drives. Sometimes there will also be performance differences if the flash is shady, and we will cover that possibility in the review.

One last thing for the technical readers: the 2TB SKU is using 1Tb, not 512Gb, dies. The updated 990 Pro has used both die sizes for 2TB. For an eight-channel controller like the 990 Pros, using 512Gb dies can provide additional interleaving. For the four-channel SM2268XT2 on the GameStop drive, 1Tb is sufficient to hit the ideal 16-die target for four dies per channel. If you don’t really care about the technical aspects, we can sum this up by saying that this choice has trade-offs, but for this drive, it’s probably the best way to go. It should have peak performance at 2TB.

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