SAMSUNG 980 PRO M.2 2280 1TB PCI-Express Gen 4.0 x4, NVMe 1.3 Samsung V-NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-V8P1T0B/AM

Overall Review: Passmark rating speaks for itself. Most painless and easy install ever.

Pros: This is an extremely fast SSD that is actually capable of pushing well beyond the limits of PCI Express 3.0 x 4, being advertised as 7000 MB/s read and 5000 MB/s write. As the attached benchmark picture shows, it pushes right up to those numbers, and man is it fast: this is one of few SSDs on the market which can actually use PCI Express 4.0 x 4 speeds. I upgraded from an old hybrid SSD/donut drive because Windows 10 processes such as Update and Windows Defender would periodically saturate the drive for 10+ minutes, especially on boot; Now, I boot from cold in 15 seconds (Fast-boot is enabled in Bios) and don't ever see the drive get above even 5% usage, allowing me to actually use that expensive hunk of silicon on my desk without issue (even while downloading games, updates, etc.) without seeing any drive-related performance hits. The difference is night-and-day, and since updates are bottlenecked by internet speed (which I somehow doubt will ever reach near the absurd write speed on this drive for most people), using one of these as your primary drive should give you a super-smooth computing experience for years to come. As an added bonus, game load-screen times have been slashed to around 5 seconds or less on average for me, even using graphics hardware from 2013 (hang in there R7 260x! I'm not done with you yet...).

Cons: Runs warm: if you slot it above your primary GPU slot (which is the only PCI 4.0 M.2 slot on many mid-tier motherboards), you might expect to see GPU, CPU, and VRM temperatures creep up a few degrees C. This can be mitigated by using an intake on the top of the side panel, but many modern cases forgo this fan slot for solid tempered glass panels. This shouldn't break the deal for a vast majority of people, considering the huge benefits this drive gives your computing experience, but for someone who is trying to go for some very high overclocks, you might wish to add additional cooling here or find a board which can slot the M.2 on the bottom and still run at PCI Express 4.0 speeds.

Overall Review: This is a great product which I would happily recommend. You get what you pay for, and this SSD puts out speeds that are quite literally triple those of the lower-end M.2 drives. While pricey, most users won't need more than 1 GB for programs, games, files, etc. If you're looking for a drive just to boot from, the 250GB should be plenty without breaking the bank and you'll get most of the benefits of the M.2 PCI Express 4.0 slot while freeing up disc bandwidth for your larger SATA drives. Notes for potential buyers: the 1TB drive I got is single-sided, and M-keyed. This guarantees wide compatibility, but you will likely have to add a second (smaller) thermal pad on top of the pre-installed one on your motherboard before slotting it in. Your experience may vary. Check your motherboard manual before installation to make sure that you are installing this drive in a PCI 4.0 slot; on my Asus B550M-Plus board, for example, the heatsink and thermal pads were pre-installed on the M.2 PCI 3.0 chipset slot, instead of the faster PCI 4.0 CPU slot. I had to remove the thermal pad and heatsink after installation and move them over to the proper slot after already installing it on the 3.0 slot and realizing the speeds were off. Not an issue with the SSD, but something you should be aware of regardless to potentially save some time.