The Team Group Vulcan G 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. Team Group is targeting this drive at upgraders who want to replace a mechanical HDD, paired with light usage.

Under the hood, the Team Group Vulcan G uses a Silicon Motion SM2258XT controller paired with older 64-layer 3D TLC from Toshiba. 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 Vulcan G clearly in front of the Samsung 870 QVO and Crucial BX500—two highly popular 2.5" SATA budget drives. While the synthetic results would suggest otherwise, the Vulcan G is definitely able to provide you with a decent experience when used as a storage drive. Yes, you'll be waiting longer for some tasks to finish than on an M.2 NVMe SSD, but you're paying much less for it at the same time.

The only really weak point of the Vulcan G 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 85 MB/s—the slowest of our test group, 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 nothing that competes with the Vulcan G in terms of pricing. The Samsung 870 QVO 1 TB is currently $110, which is way too expensive. The Crucial BX500 has gone up in pricing recently, too, and now sits at $102. The Patriot P210 and ADATA SU740 are roughly comparable to the Vulcan G, but more expensive at $90. Once you go above that mark, you'll be in affordable M.2 NVMe SSDs territory, which could be a good alternative if you have a free M.2 slot. If you just want to upgrade your laptop HDD to an SSD or boost performance of an older PC, then the Vulcan G is a great choice I can recommend. If you're building a quiet media PC and don't need a lot of storage, you should also consider the Vulcan G. It would be nice if Team Group gave us bigger drives at such a price point, though. 2 TB and even 4 TB variants would sell very well.