The Neo Forza NFS01 comes at truly incredible pricing of just $80. Yes, that's the price for the 1 TB version, not for 512 GB. At that price point of just 8 cents per gigabyte, the drive is one of the most affordable 2.5" SSDs out there. Neo Forza is targeting this drive at upgraders who want to replace a mechanical HDD in a system that sees light usage.

Under the hood, the NFS01 uses a Silicon Motion SM2258XT controller paired with older 64-layer 3D TLC from SanDisk. It's nice to see TLC instead of QLC used on a budget drive. For cost savings, a DRAM cache chip isn't installed. DRAM on an SSD is used as fast temporary storage for the drive's internal mapping tables, which translate between physical disk addresses (the OS sees these) and the actual location of where the data is stored in the flash chips: "which chip, at which location". Using DRAM has a speed advantage as it operates much faster than flash, but it's a cost/performance trade-off.

Looking at our real-life performance results, we see the Neo Forza NFS01 slightly behind the Crucial BX500, and a good deal slower than the Samsung 870 QVO—two highly popular 2.5" SATA budget drives. It definitely comes down to pricing: out of those, as well as similar drives, you should buy the most affordable option. Of course, compared to higher-end SATA drives and M.2 NVMe disks, the NFS01 falls behind, but if it's for a system that sees only light usage, the NFS01 will be perfectly fine. Think an Internet browsing PC for your mom and dad, or a media streaming PC.

The only really weak point of the NFS01 is sequential writes when the SLC cache is exhausted, though at 340 GB, the SLC cache is very large. This also means that once exhausted, the drive has to juggle copying SLC to TLC to free up space, all while managing incoming data. This results in an extremely low write rate of around 100 MB/s, slower than even QLC drives and most HDDs. For power users, this will definitely be a problem, but for the vast majority of consumers, this will be a complete non-issue because they don't write a lot of data at once. Maybe a few GB here and there, but that's it. Game downloads should be fine unless you have Gigabit Internet or faster, at which point the SSD could become the bottleneck.

I mentioned the outstanding price before. At $80, there really is not much that competes with the NFS01 in terms of pricing. The Samsung 870 QVO 1 TB is currently $104—crazy expensive. The Crucial BX500 has gone up in pricing recently, too, and now sits at $110—too much. The Team Group CX1 and Lexar NQ100 are $88, making them the strongest NFS01 competitors. We reviewed the Team Group Vulcan G a while ago—it was $80 back then, but is now $96. Given these current prices, I can definitely recommend the NFS01, but only as long as its price is so competitive. Even at $80 I don't doubt for a second that Neo Forza is making a profit on these drives, look at the PCB, it's two flash chips and one SSD controller. If you have a free M.2 slot, any budget M.2 NVMe drive will give you much better performance for around $20 more. If you just want to upgrade your laptop HDD to an SSD or boost performance of an older PC, then the NFS01 is a great choice. Neo Forza giving us bigger drives at such a price point would be nice, though. 2 TB and even 4 TB variants would sell very well.