Good 2.5" SSD for HTPC/LAN setup

[atxcyclist]

So I'm building a somewhat budget HTPC/gaming box, and at this point I'm down to an SSD purchase as the final bit. There seem to be a good variety of brands available at this point. I am aware that the Samsung drives are the best, but not looking to drop that type of cash on this setup. I'm looking in the 480-512gb range, something that won't get filled up too fast but isn't excessive. Amazon has some ADATA, SanDisk, Kingston, Pioneer, Crucial, and Silicon Power drives in the relative price range I'm looking at, about $53-69. I have experience with most of those brands but not all. As best as I can tell, the vast majority of these are 3D NAND type flash, although I'm not informed enough to know the pros and cons of each type. Is there much of a difference given the same flash storage type? Any of those brands I should shy away from?

[JammyCreedog]

I have a Crucial mx500 and have nothing but good things to say about it. Good cost, maxes out sata transfer speeds, good endurance and imo good looks. TLC and SLC nand are fine, stay away from new super low cost ones with QLC, they dont have the endurance.  If you can, get a ssd with inteligent cache'ing, it makes it even faster.

[SupaKomputa]

For SSD Samsung and Crucial is best.

You should get SSD from 1st tier producer like samsung, crucial, sandisk, kingston and toshiba.

Everything else is 2nd tier which only buy chip from 1st tier / rebrand the whole unit.

SSD have many types SLC, MLC and TLC (google it), it correnspondence with performance, durability and performance, being the latter is worst in durability and performance but higher capacity and cheaper price.

3d TLC is the evolution to elevate the performance and capacity of TLC nand.

 

So if you are doing very intensive IO applications, like a server, you should stay away from TLC.

But for average joe's, TLC should be fine.