Would changing to proper, five times more expensive, community-accepted, "enthusiast" devices make my life better?
Five times more expensive? What FUD and nonsense are you talking about?! - Decent "Editor's Choice Award" TLC drives are NOT more expensive: This NV2 and the excellent SN570 are both the same cost/TB as the QLC NAND options:
Or, at least, make my OS boot significantly faster than 15 seconds it takes now, games load instantly, browser start in less than a second it takes currently?
Not one of those three things is sensitive to the NAND used, or in fact particularly storage-bottlenecked - which is why even 235MB/s SATA2 SSDs are barely any slower in those three scenarios. Either IOPS, software wait timers, or CPU/RAM decompression and operations dominate the time all of those tasks take. If you don't need to write data, then you don't need to care about performance, only reliability and price, in which case QLC has historically been reliable enough, but with a measurably lower lifespan, and still costs just as much as faster, higher-endurance options. I'm not saying QLC will ruin that experience, but even as an extremely light, consumer workload with zero signiricant write requirements, you're still giving up both endurance and write performance for free. Why? Will the next person who gets your PC also have the same requirements as you, or will they be disappointed that moving large files for archive/video editing/indexing/collation absolutely sucks on your drive?
If you were offered a good, fast, fun, long-lasting, reliable car for the
exact same price as an acceptable, highway-speed-capable, boring, short-lived (but still as reliable) car - which one would you pick? You don't care about fun or driving faster than highway speeds, holding onto it for decades, or resale value? Then fine - it makes no difference if you genuinely have no concern about all the caveats.
Even in this test differences between cheapest and most expensive drives are imperceptible to anyone other than obsessive types running benchmarks in a loop since the moment they open their eyes.
Did you even read the review? it's 4x faster than the QLC NV1 - that's not 'imperceptible to anyone' and copying large files is something a lot of people do. Maybe not daily, but having to wait four minutes instead of one minute
every single time quickly gets tiresome if you do any amount of it more than once in a blue moon:
Further to that, the software installations and just general search/indexing performance of identically-priced TLC drives like the SN570 or NV2 can be anywhere from 20-50% faster in a huge range of everyday tasks. Photoshop and Premiere performance are night-and-day different.
I get it, you just boot your PC and game/browse and the inferior QLC drives are just fine for that. Not everyone has such a limited demand of their storage, and the bit that irks me about QLC is that it absolutely sucks for people who do need the performance, yet manufacturers are taking the cost savings and failing to pass them onto the consumer. If slower QLC drives were much cheaper than TLC, I'd have a different stance, but they're not. They're provably worse in almost every measurable way and still cost just as much as the
objectively better hardware.
