INTRODUCTION

   Whenever i see people talk about SSDs (solid state drives) in various forums the manufacturer names that usually come up are Samsung, WD and Seagate. Still one of the things this industry has taught me time and again is to never underestimate the "smaller" players and over the years quite a few have actually emerged in this specific market, most notably Sabrent which has gathered numerous awards and praise by consumers for its SSD lines. Still, there are other storage media manufacturers out there with which I’ve never had the chance to cooperate before and thus had no access to their products in order to evaluate them. Among those is Inland, an Micro Center brand which has released numerous SSD models to date and with me i have their latest PCIe 4.0 Gen4 one, the Performance Plus 2TB.

   Micro Center is among the nation's leading information technology, communications, and electronic device suppliers, operating twenty-five large stores in major markets nationwide. Founded in 1979 in Columbus, Ohio, Micro Center has grown steadily and profitably. Our stores are designed to supply the needs of a wide variety of consumers – from small businesses to local schools - with well-trained associates who offer information technology solutions.

   The Performance Plus by Inland is yet another PCIe 4.0 Gen4 SSD line (available in 1/2/4TB capacities) based on the 8-channel (tri-core) PS5018-E18 NVMe v1.4 NAND flash controller by PHISON paired with 176-layer 3D TLC NAND flash (B47R) by Micron and 2666MHz DDR4 SDRAM by SK Hynix (2GB for the 2TB model that i have here). The PS5018-E18 NAND flash controller by PHISON features their 4th Gen LDPC engine (low-density parity check) along with end-to-end data path protection, wear levelling, thermal throttling (70 degrees Celsius limit), TRIM, bad block management, dynamic range SLC cache and SmartECC (RAID ECC) and fully supports AES-256bit hardware encryption and TCG Opal 2.0 and Pyrite. Inland covers their entire Performance Plus line of M.2 NVMe Gen4 SSDs with a 6-year limited warranty and in regards to durability they report an MTBF (meantime between failures) of 1.6 million hours and a TBW of 700 for the 1TB model, 1400 for the 2TB model and 3000 for the 4TB model.