SAMSUNG 970 PRO M.2 2280 512GB PCIe Gen3. X4, NVMe 1.3 64L V-NAND 2-bit MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-V7P512BW

Pros: A. SUPER FAST CrystalDiskMark 6.0 :READ:3502.5[MB/S] WRITE:2325.8[MB/S] B. 20% Faster than Samsung 960 Pro M.2 C. Looks cool D. Great Price $249.99

Cons: A. Hot B. It's 3 C Hotter than Samsung 960 Pro M.2 512GB

Overall Review: GET THE SAMSUNG NVME DRIVER FOR OPTIMAL PERFORMANCE : http://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/minisite/ssd/download/tools/

Pros: I upgraded from an 850 PRO. The difference in terms of raw throughput are not noticeable in my use-cases, the real benefit for me is that this uses NVMe (instead of AHCI over SATA) which allows me to multitask multiple "large" file operations without them causing each other to slow down, or sometimes even completely halt, until the previous task completes. This alone greatly improves my productivity as it eliminates a system bottleneck. Note however, this could be solved by much less expensive PCIe SSDs. That said, I specifically chose this SSD because it's the only (non-enterprise) device left using MLC. This is important to me because it means I can rely on sustained and consistent performance when I need to move hundreds of GB worth of data around, which is common in my workloads. For the average person I would say this is not needed and in fact provides negligible performance for the majority of consumer workloads. Being my first time installing an M.2 card, this was super easy to install. Like, installing RAM level of easy. Samsung's software made it very quick and painless to clone/transfer all my data. It's literally just a few mouse clicks, a small bit of waiting, and you're done.

Cons: Although sequential speeds are through the roof, in day to day usage it isn't really useful to me. Random speeds and latency are still dominated by Intel Optane, but I couldn't justify the price of getting the 905P. For "older" systems like mine that were on the forefront and just on the verge of M.2 slots becoming mainstream, you might have a bit of a hassle getting your motherboard to accept this as a boot drive. I had to physically disconnect all my other drives before it finally gave me the option and then it tried to revert back when I reconnected them. For modern systems you shouldn't have any problems, though results will likely vary per board/manufacturer.

Overall Review: If you're looking for an SSD for gaming or general office use, I would just get the cheapest PCIe NVM SSD and call it a day, you likely won't notice any performance difference in day-to-day use. This device and most others are a waste of money unless you have a real use that justifies the massive price difference (for me it's work related to photo/videography, and sometimes SQL databases)

Pros: Incredibly fast. (3500mbps read, 2700mbps write) Very small. (80mm) Great price. (Purchased at $379) Easy installation. (Literally one screw) Fantastic software and support. (Samsung Magician, Samsung Data Migration)

Cons: Subjective... if you’re coming from a 960 or even a 950 and you don’t do intensive 4K video editing you won’t notice a difference especially in gaming or every day computing. These types of drives are so fast that you may shave 10ths of a second off boot and load times. Unless like I said, you’re doing intensive video editing in 4K.

Overall Review: The Samsung magician software for managing drive health and updating firmware is extremely straightforward and easy to use. Also my experience using the Samsung data migration software was stellar. I upgraded from a 950 Pro 512gb to this 970 Pro 1tb and needed to clone the drive since it was my primary boot disk. The Samsung migration software cloned nearly 300gb of data in just under 5 minutes. I change to boot priority in the bios to the new 970 and it worked without a hitch like nothing ever happened except I have almost double the write speed and twice the space.

Pros: I needed a 2nd NVMe boot drive for my wife's PC, so I figured I might as well get an upgrade out of it as well. I saw Newegg had the 970 PRO for the best price around, and it is quite a bit cheaper than what I paid for the same size 950 PRO years ago. While the 970 PRO is not as amazing in terms of sheer WOW factor as the first NVMe drive I used was, it is still an impressive upgrade from the 950 PRO. Here's the Crystal Disk Mark differences, as you will see the 970 PRO did hit its advertised speeds on my Asus Maximus X Code with i7-8700K at 5GHz powering it. 950 PRO Read/Write SeqQ32T1 2239.3/1543.3 4KiBQ8T8 1245.2/413.5 4KiBQ32T1 427.1/340.7 4KiBQ1T1 49.79/137.0 970 PRO Read/Write SeqQ32T1 3543.1/2342.7 4KiBQ8T8 1373.1/2043.9 4KiBQ32T1 441.4/342.3 4KiBQ1T1 58.26/150.4 Honestly, outside of benchmarks like this and maybe copying from one NVMe drive to another, you may never notice the differences in speed between these drives. They also come with an outstanding warranty in the unlikely event one were to fail.

Cons: None really. Other than Optane which costs more and comes in odd form-factors, you won't find a faster M.2 2280 NVMe SSD.

Overall Review: Looking forward to the day the 2TB drives get cheaper so I can put my entire game library on one of these speed demons.

Pros: Are there cheaper drives? Yes. Are they fast? Yes. Do you want to trust critical data with a cheaper drive? No. Outside of an extremely expensive Optane drive - this is the best drive for professionals on the market. If reliability of data has any importance to you - this is the drive you want. The 2-bit, as opposed to 3+ bit controller, directly correlates to reliability and longevity. If your data is at all important to you - this is the drive you need. All it takes is one failed cheaper ssd to see the light.

Cons: It cost a bit more. Is your data important?

Pros: This thing is pretty fast. It's MLC, so SHOULD last a good while. Very easy to set up. Migration software worked perfect the first try.

Cons: The cost is a bit high It has yet to make breakfast, or clean house for me.

Overall Review: I am using this on and ASRock X370 Taichi with an R5 1600X. Someone said in one review that you can not get the advertised speed on a system like this. I only have the one and only one of my M.2 slots is PCIe 3 X4, the other is PCIe 2 X4. I can't copy between two of these so, benchmark is what I have. Well, I set up a trial of a RAM disk, copied a 1GB folder from RAM disk to the drive, no idea the speed, was a blip. But here is my benchmark scores. CrystalDiskMark 5.5.0 x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- * MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s] * KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 3590.167 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2311.186 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 325.407 MB/s [ 79445.1 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 260.283 MB/s [ 63545.7 IOPS] Sequential Read (T= 1) : 2426.329 MB/s Sequential Write (T= 1) : 2252.816 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 60.635 MB/s [ 14803.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 164.688 MB/s [ 40207.0 IOPS] Test : 1024 MiB [C: 28.6% (136.3/476.5 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec] Date : 2018/07/09 15:21:35 OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 17134] (x64) I have only had it 1.5 months at this point, but I am liking it, a lot.

Pros: Unbelievably fast Small Form Factor

Cons: Im not sure if there are any. Remember though, these modules DO RELY ON COOLING, so keep some air flow if you do not have a heat-sink application. The performance is effected greatly by temperature.

Overall Review: It is totally noticeable, and heartwarming to run one of these drives as your main OS drive. Get one. Seriously.

Pros: I'm using this as a boot drive. It is on a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Master motherboard, running a i9 9900K with 32Gb of RAM. Boot time to a Windows 10 signon screen is SIX seconds after I see the Aorus logo on the monitor!

Cons: What Cons?