A £200 8TB SSD THAT’S NOT A SCAM! Micro 5300 Pro 2.5” 7.68TB SATA SSD

This bad boy is a Micron 5300 Pro, 2.5 inch SATA SSD, specifically this one is a whopping 7.68 terabytes in capacity, and my friend bought this for just £230. I know, it sounds like a scam, right? Well much to my surprise, it actually isn’t. This enterprise drive launched in 2019, and likely retailed for somewhere between £1,500 and £2,000, with used examples on ebay asking for around £600 right now, so why is this so cheap? Can you buy one? Let me explain.

First, what even is this drive? Micron – owners of Crucial – are a tier one memory maker, as in they actually design and build the NAND flash chips that are in this thing. Micron themselves tend to do enterprise products, leaving the consumer grade stuff to Crucial, so this being an enterprise drive makes sense. The 5300 line launched in 2019, with both M.2 and SATA SSD form factors, with this, the 5300 Pro being the highest capacity drive they made. Being a SATA drive you’re looking at 600MB/s maximum, although Micron rated this for 540MB/s in reads and 520MB/s in writes, which is pretty standard for a decent SATA SSD. Of course we’ll be testing what the real world performance is like in a second. The two most interesting ratings for me though are the endurance and mean time before failure figures. The endurance rating is a full 9 petabytes written, and the mean time before failure is 3 million device hours. For context, that’s 1,172 full-drive writes to reach that endurance rating, AND 342 YEARS of powered-on operation before the AVERAGE Micron 5300 Pro failed. They’ve sure rated this like it’s going to survive an apocalypse – but that’s what you get when you buy enterprise hardware!

I think it’s worth taking a look at what’s inside here – I mean this thing is hefty, not like today’s modern drives that have 2TB of capacity built into a single chip (like the Crucial P310 I reviewed recently, video in the cards above) – so what’s taking up all that mass? Well, it’s a full drive, double sided too, with 16 total Micron 96 layer NAND flash packages, combined with a Marvell 88SS1074 controller. You’ve also got 8GB of NAND flash, I assume either as a cache or perhaps power-loss prevention storage. Those Micron packages work out to be 480GB a piece, which makes a lot of sense – although it is interesting to see their newer 196 layer NAND is quadruple the density, packing 2TB into one chip rather than 480GB. Still, this is a lot of NAND, and some rather high quality stuff too it seems. 

So, why is this thing so cheap? Well it’s hard to say why CeX – which shockingly the insist you channel your inner 13 year old and pronounce “CeX”, I kid you not – they priced it so shockingly low, but what I do know is that at least at the time of filming they do have more than one of these in stock that you can buy online, at £230 no less. Hypothetically you’re taking a risk that you might be buying a drive on its last legs, although frankly with the endurance and MTBF ratings I’d doubt it, but as further proof let’s take a look at Crystal Disk Info. This is by far the most shocking thing – this drive has only been powered on 10 times, two of which were me and my friend. This was clearly put in a server and has run basically non-stop for 23,500 hours – that’s around 1,000 days, or a bit over two and a half years. In that time, it only had around 14 TB written to it – that’s basically only two drive writes in total. That is literally nothing. A rounding error on this thing’s endurance rating. There is nothing here that could even be considered worrying. No errors, no bad sectors, nothing. It’s effectively a brand new, 8 terabyte, solid state drive for the price of a 2TB NVMe drive. What’s not to love?

Performance wise, that’s where this thing starts to show its age. Being a SATA drive it isn’t exactly top notch, with the connection itself capping out at 6Gb/s, compared to 128Gb/s on a PCIe Gen 5 drive, or more realistically 32Gb/s on a PCIe Gen 3 drive. That means you get, in this case, around 534 MB/s in reads and 526MB/s in writes in Crystal Disk Mark, which for a SATA drive is pretty decent. Interestingly, looking at the ATTO Disk Benchmark results, you can see just how bandwidth limited this thing is. It reaches its peak pretty early and stays there. With a faster connection, I see no doubt this could run faster, although thanks to the 16 NAND packages I understand why Micron capped the M.2 form factor at 2TB. While transferring files to it, it sat around 400MB/s, and duplicating files was more like 250MB/s. That all checks out – and the temperatures were on the decent side too. 

One interesting number HWInfo reported was the total drive reads – that sat at just 122 TB, which brings us nicely onto where the hell did this thing come from? Well while we will never know for sure, my best guess is that this was bought in early 2020, installed in a server, likely as part of an array, and used basically non-stop for three years. The server rebooted maybe 6 times total in those years, then the server was decommissioned and either swapped for cloud storage, or upgraded to NVMe drives instead. This drive was likely sold to a tech recycler who wiped it, then, and this is arguably the most confusing step, sold it to CeX for pennies on the dollar. Like I said, even with this being a used, older, SATA drive, you should still expect to pay hundreds – like £600 – for a drive like this, so the fact that CeX is selling these for just £230 means they must have bought it for more like £150 per drive. That’s pretty crazy!

So, at least while stocks last, should you buy one of these 8TB enterprise drives used? Well buying enterprise equipment in general is often a good deal, as you tend to get the most reliable, performant and feature-rich versions of whatever it is you’re buying. In this case, this is an SSD that should outlive you, and about 5 more generations to come, at least in terms of mean-time-before-failure. It isn’t lightning fast, but as your system drive, hell yeah this is amazing. No need for a small boot drive and big games drive, this is a one-and-done solution, for the same price as a decent single SSD. Who cares that your games might load 0.2 seconds slower when you can store all your games at once, all on one drive? Or maybe don’t use it in your PC, buy two and make a sick home network storage server! It’ll more than saturate gigabit ethernet – hell 2.5G too – and for just £460 you get 8TB of low power, high reliability storage. What’s not to love?