The drive works very well and is much faster than the hard disk I was using. Everything about my system seems faster since installing this drive. I've heard you should keep 25 percent of an SSD/NVME drive empty for best performance and lifespan so keep that in mind when determining what capacity drive you want. It is not designed to have a heat sink installed.
Some info for people who have no experience with NVME type drive setup/install in place of your C drive aka windows 10 boot disk.
1. this drive does not come with the screw to hold it in place. It is a very tiny screw and they can be different for every brand of computer so make sure you find a screw to fit that NVME standoff on your motherboard. My HP Pavilion is 3 years old and has no screw in the hole so I got one from a friend with an extra on his board. If you don't have one you may have to order an NVME screw kit.
2. There are 3 or 4 different downloads you need to do from the Samsung website. A. Samsung Magician app - info and diagnostics for the new drive and very basic info on all drives in system. B. Samsung Data Migration app - use to clone your C drive (Windows 10 boot drive) so you can boot off the new SSD drive. You most likely want this because it will greatly speed up most everything you do. The cloning is simple but do not do it until you have installed the latest firmware and replace the windows 10 default NVME driver with the Samsung one. C. firmware update that would be installed to the new drive - my EVO 970 had the latest firmware and did not need this. D. Windows Driver - you need this and Samsung wants you to install it before doing any operations on the drive.
So you would 1. make sure you have the screw to hold the NVME drive in place. 2. physically install the drive 3. start up your computer and press X and Windows key and select Disk Management. You should see the new drive as unallocated space - initialize it as GPT (not MBR). You can format as NTFS also if you want - I did but I think the clone software might do all that anyway. Now install the Samsung driver, magician and data migration apps and also update your drive's firmware if needed. Restart and go into the Magician software and to the second window - I think its drive properties or similar and it should list the Samsung NVME driver is in use - good to verify. Next go into the data migration and clone your old hard disk onto the new drive - how long it takes depends on how much space you have used. Mine took about half an hour or so for about 200 GB. Once that is done then you want to shut down, go into your computer and physically unplug the data cable from you old hard disk. Turn the computer on and go into the bios setup and ensure the boot order shows you new NVME as number one. Now your PC should load windows from the new M.2 NVME drive.
Note: Because one is a clone, now your new drive and old one have the same ID. Not good. If both drives are plugged in it will boot from the old hdd regardless of bios settings. Fix this by: 1. Shut down and connect the data cable back to your old HDD. Boot up - it will boot from hdd, not m.2. Use X + windows key to run command prompt as administrator. type: diskpart then type: list disk - identify your new drives number and type: select (space) the drive number then type: online then type: uniqueid then type: exit. Reboot, go into bios, disable boot security and enable legacy boot. Make sure the M.2 is the first in the boot order. That should be all you need to do to keep your old drive and boot from the new one. You can delete everything off your old hard disk if you want but you don't have to - you can leave it as a bootable windows disk. That's what I did.
For anyone with an HP Pavilion 570-P0x0 from 2017 or later with Lubin motherboard I can tell you that this drive will work for you. Also, I did not have to update my computer bios for this to work. BTW - this drive is about 20 times faster than the drive it replaced. Apps now pop onto the screen almost instantly, even web pages seem to load a lot faster.
| RAM | 500 GB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 500 GB Solid State Hard Drive |
