Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsMuch faster than advertised, good drive for a budget build.
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2022
I’ll start by saying that I am getting speeds of 2350 MB/s read and 1350 MB/s write on this drive, which is much faster than the 1700 / 1000 advertised rate. I have no complaints about meeting the advertised specs. That being said, this is a budget drive option. For PCIe gen 3, x4, the theoretical max is 4000 MB/s, and a good drive will reach 3600 MB/s read speeds. Also note, this is a single sided SSD, flat on the back - some are double sided, generally 2TB or above.
Keep in mind, this drive is gen 3 – the latest version is gen 4, which has a maximum potential of 8000 MB/s (i.e., it is twice as fast). If your PC supports gen 4, you might consider getting a gen 4 drive to get the full speed.
I do a lot of these upgrades/installs - as you can see from my photo I'm currently working on updating several recently de-commissioned HP Pro desks. I’ll note some common tips to keep in mind.
If you are going to pair this drive with a M2 pcie nvme adapter, then some things to look for are:
(1) You want an x4 adapter. Do NOT buy an x1 adapter, they are useless. An x1 adapter will be a 75% throttle on the drive, which is basically the speed of a SATA SSD.
(2) This drive will only work with an adapter that accepts M key drives. If it says B+M key that is okay.
(3) Look for a gen 3 adapter. Some are gen 4, at a price premium, but that is useless to you with this drive, because it only supports gen 3.
(4) Make sure it has a PCIe slot (metal bracket). Especially if you’re using a heatsink, the weight is bad for your motherboard slot. I look for ones with vents in the slots. If you have a SFF PC, check that it has a low-profile adapter. Most do, even if it’s not listed in the product specs, but in that case check the reviews and pictures to see what’s included.
(5) Buy the cheapest adapter you can find that meets the above requirements. These things come in all ranges of prices, but they all do the same thing. There’s no reason to pay more than $10 for an adapter. Some people will say oh this one cannot be used for a boot drive, or this is too slow, or will ask if it is compatible with a specific brand SSD. But the truth is that all the single slot adapters out there are exactly the same thing, and will work or not work exactly the same. The issues people experience, 99% of the time is their system, and their system settings – not the adapter. Some adapters have slots for multipole SSDs, SATA and NVME is okay, but if you want an adapter that accepts more than one PCIe M2 NVME you need bifurcation support on your computer’s motherboard, or a switch chip on the adapter (you’re looking at a minimum $140), or it won’t work (you’ll just see 1 drive).
Upgrading an older PC.
If your PC’s motherboard has is an Intel 9 series or newer chipset (e.g., z97 or later), then it will natively support M2 PCIe NVME boot, even if you don’t have an M2 slot on the motherboard. You might need to make adjustments to BIOs, however. You can boot from an NVME via a PCIe adapter, which start at around $7 (noted above). Any adapter will do, especially on an older board. For newer gen 4 boards with a supporting CPU, you’d generally want to add a heatsink as the higher bandwidth translates to much more heat generation.
If your PC’s motherboard is an Intel 6 series or newer chipset, then it will NOT natively support NVME boot via PCIe. However, you can use the M2 PCIe NVME drive as a storage drive. Also, if the manufacturer offered a later BIOs update, particularly with higher end z87 systems, there’s a good chance that upgrading BIOs will allow for PCIe NVME boot. If the manufacturer did not release a BIOs update, it is still quite easy to update the BIOs yourself, by just dropping in the NVME microcode to your BIOS, and re-flashing. I’ve done this several times. This does pose some risk of a file corruption. If the chip is socketed, I prefer to buy a spare BIOS chip, copy the PCs bios chip, program it with the NVME code on the spare chip, and then swap out the chips on the board. I’ve noticed a higher-than-normal flash-fail rate on custom BIOS (which means you’d need to pop it and out reprogram anyway).
There was one oddity with this drive. When I was installing windows 11 on it, it initially blocked me as wrong file system (i.e., MBR). This is extremely odd because on a new drive you'd expect it to not be initialized. I pulled a cmd prompt and noted there was data written to it, so I just wiped it clean and proceeded. It might have been because the first time I booted with it I had forgotten to plug in the bootable flash drive, and it opened up in recovery since there was no OS. I can't say, but just noting.
In summary, this drive performs as expected, no unexpected freezes or stuttering. I’ve also experienced higher than advertised read and write speeds with this drive. If you are looking for a boot drive, I’d strongly suggest 1TB or larger, especially if you’re using it for gaming.
