Now that the other flash fabs have nearly equaled rival Samsung's V-NAND in performance, most companies now have the ability to build low-cost consumer products that compete for the performance crown. Samsung still has an advantage in NVMe performance, but the bus limited SATA spec means you can get class-leading performance from a number of different drives and that helped to drive down costs.

For third-party manufacturers, those without significant flash or controller IP, the winning combination is the Silicon Motion, Inc. (SMI) SM2258 4-channel controller paired with Micron's 64L or 96L 3-bit per cell memory. This combination is open to just about any company willing to write a check, and many have released similar models. The most well-known with this configuration is the Crucial MX500, but that is mainly because it was the first to market thanks to Crucial's direct access to Micron's flash.