Question 1

First time building a PC. Can I use this as my main (OS) drive, and have a 2.5" SSD as extended storage?

Accepted Answer

That's exactly what I did.  I used this m.2 SSD as my C: drive for WIN 10 and all my key applications (including a few games I play most often), and I have a 1 TB HDD for documents, photos, music, etc. (things that don't require speed).  The main SSD still has about 120gb free even after installing the OS and key apps.  Good luck!

Question 2

Do these 50 mW cards need a heatsink ? or do they come with a heatsink ?

Accepted Answer

They do no come with a heatsink and they should not need one. Average users will certainly not need a heatsink. You have to be doing extreme workloads like high I/O database/web server or continuous writes for over 20 minutes to possibly run into thermal throttling on most 2017/2018 NVMe SSDs. Check out Anandtech(dot)com for their SSD reviews as they do extended benchmarks of SSDs and can usually spot thermal throttling problems.

Question 3

Will it work on a laptop?

Accepted Answer

M.2 2280 
(M.2 refers to the slot that is used to plug in the drive, 2280 refers to the size of the card, 22mm wide by 80mm long)
Newer laptop may have a M.2 slot, you need to check in the owners or user manual to determine if they will take that M.2 drive and size and if is not in use.
You provably have a SATA connections for the Hard Drives or SSD's and remenber that some large laptops have two SATA ports (in my case, I installed a SSD OS/boot drive and a Hard drive in the second SATA port for storage, the M.2 drive was installed in a friend desktop).
Before deciding if you can upgrade determine your needs:
If you have a hard drive in your laptop and replaced with a SSD or a M.2 drive, you will notice a great improvement.
If yo have an SSD installed in your laptop and replaced with a M.2 drive, it may not be to so great of a difference (price vs performance)

HDD or Hard drive
Pros: large storage, lowest price 
Cons: slow compared to a SSD

SSD or solid state drive
Pros: speed and and good price
Cons: price per gigabite

M.2 (if you have the port)
Pros: fastest of them all (check the specifications, some M.2 drive are only as fast as a SSD)
Cons: Price per gigabite

Question 4

Can you install these in an x4 PCIe slot on a desktop PC motherboard?
If yes, can you install 2 and configure as RAID 1 or 0?

Accepted Answer

Sometimes no, If you don't have an M.2 slot on your mother board you have to use an adapter. You can not boot from it on all motherboards. I have a really old PC from a major vendor (maybe 6 years or more), where I bought the adapter and used a purchased program to transfer the C: drive to this SSD, but it did not boot from the SSD. I have newer PC's where I did buy the adpater and they work. But now you have watch very carefully, the SSD there are at least 2 M.2 pin configurations. You have to get the right adpater for the SSD. If you can't tell from the SSD description, I counted the connections on the small connector on the SSD. From the picture you can see 3 on yours. This SSD does not say it's an NVMe, you may check more, but my M.2 SSD with this pin configuration did not fit into an adapter that has NVMe in its description. New Egg customer service has some tech help you can get to over the phone, I got one of them once who knew about the parts they had very well. Also you have to find out from the manual of the motherboard how many PCIe lanes you will be getting for the slot you will put the adpater in.  Some of my motherboards will not have an unused x4 slot with the other cards you need in the PC.  When you asked about putting 2 of these in, you might need to look for an adpater with 2 or 4 M.2 connectors on it, but then you might not get full speed to both, but still way faster that 2 hard drives, you'll have to see if with 2 M.2s on it how many lanes it will use and how many you are not using on your motherboard. Note read mother board manual carefully, some slots are labeled x16 or x8 or x4 but if another board is in another slot, you might not get X16 or X8 or X4 in that slot. If you get the right parts you might get over 2,000 or 3,000 MBps (read) where a regular old hard drive might hit 125-130 MBps.

Question 5

The stick came with a cover over the chips that are exposed in the pics above. Does the cover remain, or should it be removed?

Accepted Answer

The stick arrives in a plastc container. Remove it from the container and install.

Do NOT remove anything from the stick. Doing so will void the warranty.

Question 6

Will this be compatible with an Asrock Deskmini a300?

Accepted Answer

Looks like it if your cpu meets the requirements for boot:
1 x Ultra M.2 Socket (M2_2), supports type 2280 M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s) (with A-Series APU and Raven Ridge) or Gen3 x2 (16 Gb/s) (with Athlon 2xxGE series)*
* Supports NVMe SSD as boot disks

Question 7

Does anyone know how these compare to Samsung's 950 pro drives? I'm building a new system and I'm not sure if I should spend the cash on a couple of these drives or just move the 950 pro's to the new system. I read a review on anandtech and the results were all over the place and they didn't do a direct comparison to the 950's or any drives in the same class.

Accepted Answer

Don't have a 950 Pro so I can't compare them but on average Samsung and Intel NVMe drives are similar in performance. For average real world consumer usage, I doubt you'd notice a difference. NVMe is worth a step up over SATA but in my opinion there's not a big enough performance difference between the 950 EVO/Pro, 960 EVO/Pro and 760p to justify the cost of replacing with the same size drive.
Again I haven't used 960 Pros but I have used both 960 EVOs and 760p and they both seem pretty similar in real world usage.

Question 8

I have a refurbished HP Compaq 6200 Pro Small Form Factor PC with a Intel® Q65 Express Chipset. Would this SSD be compatible with my motherboard?

Accepted Answer

For any PC, just use the little "elbow" that turns the gold fingers a quarter circle and spreads the spacing to fit... search box:
M.2 to PCIe

Question 9

Is this compatible with ds918+?

Accepted Answer

Hello,

Thank you for contacting us in regards to your question. Unfortunately, that is not a question we can answer, but you can contact the manufacturer directly for possible assistance. Their contact information can be found under the 'Warranty & Returns' tab.

Support Phone: 1-425-296-3177

Thank you, 
Newegg Support

Questions & Answers