- Virtual CIO
How a Virtual CIO Can Save Your Business Money on IT
22 Feb, 2026

£1026.19 inc. VAT
AI-generated summary
If you’re paying **£855 ex-VAT for a 960GB 2.5" SATA SSD**, I’d be a bit cautious. This **Lenovo 2.5" SATA QLC** drive is the kind of thing that can make sense when you’re trying to refresh older servers/laptops that only take **SATA**, but the price you’ve quoted feels high for the technology class. QLC generally makes the “sweet spot” more about **cost-per-GB for lighter write workloads**, and less about sustained performance under heavy churn—so if this is for anything like a busy virtualisation host, heavy databases, or frequent rebuild/patch cycles, you’ll likely wish you’d spent the money on something more premium.
**Who it fits:** look at it for **boot drives, general office/line-of-business storage, lab/test environments, backups targets, or lightly used workloads** where reliability matters but write intensity is moderate. **Who should avoid it:** if the system will be doing lots of writes (VM sprawl, log-heavy apps, continuous indexing) or you care about consistent throughput over time, you’ll usually get better value buying an SSD that’s positioned more for performance and endurance—even if it costs a bit more up front, it tends to hurt less long-term.
Bottom line: I’d only buy this at that price if you specifically need **SATA + 2.5" + Lenovo sourcing** (e.g., vendor compatibility/maintenance requirements). If not, I’d shop around—**SATA drives with similar capacity are often cheaper**, and you may get a noticeably better experience with an alternative.

Lenovo
Lenovo ThinkSystem PM893 - SSD - Read Intensive - 480 GB - hot-swap - 2.5" - SATA 6Gb/s - for ThinkSystem SN550 V2, SR630 V2, SR645, SR650 V2, SR670 V2, SR850 V2, SR860 V2, ST650 V2

Lenovo
Intel S4510 Entry - SSD - 480 GB - internal - 3.5" - SATA 6Gb/s - for ThinkSystem ST50 7Y48, 7Y49

Lenovo
Samsung PM9A3 - SSD - Read Intensive - encrypted - 960 GB - internal - M.2 22110 - PCIe 4.0 x4 (NVMe) - TCG Opal Encryption, Self-Encrypting Drive (SED)

Lenovo
ThinkSystem M.2 5400 PRO 480GB Read Intensive SATA 6Gb NHS SSD