Samsung 960 EVO Series - 250GB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E250BW)

Great storage device so far! Games load and save much faster. My slightly older motherboard limits the available lanes to the PCI slot Im using to host the card, so Im only getting ~1.5GB/s read performance instead of the full 3GB/s throughput NVMe is capable of.....but thats still more than THREE TIMES as fast as I got with traditional SSDs, and its nice to know that it will be even faster when I eventually build a newer PC. Im using it to host my Steam Game Library and Saves. I estimate it loads the Video Cards memory up in about half the time of my old conventional SSD when playing Total War:Warhammer, XCOM, and Dragon Age. Below is the PCI slot Adapter I used. I just attached the NVMe card to it, plugged it in, and it worked: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MYCQP38/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1 Dont know if my motherboard would need a BIOS firmware update to boot off of it...it might...doesnt matter though because Im not using it for that. The PC already boots in less than a minute and Id rather have the performance when playing games!

Its new and shiny, and it is fast. It is also pricey. Did I mention that it is fast. Like real fast?

The difference is apparent having switched from sata m.2 to nvme m.2. My boot time dropped from 12 secs to 5 secs. Snappy response. Good product, only problem was I had to fresh install windows.

i use 2 of these on my Synology 4 bay nas disk station DS918+ they work perfect 24/7

Never notice how slow a standard harddrive is until you install an M.2. This drive was very easy to install and computer located the drive instantly.

Fast! Affordable! Don’t question wether you need this, just buy it! You won’t regret it!

Absolutely amazing product. I will order another on next PC build.

Let me start by saying that after a couple days use, I give the 960 EVOs performance a 5 star rating. With that said, the rest of this review might sound like Im dissatisfied with the product. Im not dissatisfied, but honestly not impressed either. I bought the EVO thinking there would be a major difference between it and my current cheap SATA III SSD, without having to splurge on a 960 PRO. If I am completely honest, there is only a slight (if any) difference in performance between my two M.2 SSDs. Maybe the boasted advantages of PCIe over SATA III are only apparent in dual RAID layout(?). But I hear RAID is bad for SSDs in comparison to my dual AHCI, and couldnt use it with differing interfaces regardless. I also feel I should add the disclaimer that Im not a heavy PC gamer (Sony PS all the WAAAYYY!! <-- wait, are platform wars still a thing?). I have done some CG modeling with files saved on this EVO and render times were pretty much exactly the same as on the SATA III. Maybe rendering is just all about the RAM, idk. My average Win 10 boot time for m.2 SATA III: 7.6 secs. My average Win 10 boot time for data migrated m.2 960 EVO: 7.1 secs. The only time I noticed a slight edge was during a single 40GB file download. EVO beat the SATA by only a couple minutes. But lets be honest, how often are you going to be doing 40GB transfers to your drive? Long story short - I like the 960 EVO but Id recommend saving a few bucks by getting a cheaper brands PCIe or even a SATA III since I didnt notice much of a performance gap. Or, if you are a heavy PC gamer, maybe spend a little more and go all out for the 960 PRO (Disclaimer - I personally know nothing of the PROs performance). The EVO seems to kinda rest in this void area. Its not fast(er) enough to justify costing more than a SATA III, but still not cheap enough to justify buying something slower than a PRO like a SATA III. Ugh!! Middle children, amirite? If any experienced EVO users read this and have any settings suggestions to improve performance, feel free to comment and let me know. Ive already downloaded Samsung Magician and apparently the RAPID mode doesnt apply to EVO. Whew!! You deserve an honorary golf trophy if you survived this hurricane of words!!

Went onto an ASUS z270i mini ATX without a hitch. Instant detection in BIOS, etc, nothing to install/setup. Did I mention its blazing fast? I was extremely curious if the MB was using the proper bus for this and decided to benchmark it to find out for sure. It registered slightly over 3GB/s seq. read in CrystalDiskMark, as hoped! For reference, a standard (fast) SATA SSD will top out around 500-550MB/s, or roughly 1/6th the speed. Given the massive files I work on in Capture One/Photoshop (over a gig usually), this should *drastically* improve my save times!

I waited way too long to get an nvme solid state drive. As long as your motherboard supports this technology, please opt for these types of solid state drive over the traditional 2.5 solid state drives that use SATA. Also there are m.2 drives that look like this that also use SATA. Just be sure that the ssd indicates that it is PCIe NVMe, as these drives operate much much faster than even a decent SATA Solid state drive. Pros: Almost the fastest storage solution (slower than the PRO version of same name) Very compact Samsung really is the most reliable performance ssd producer Insanely fast boot times compared to traditional hard disk drives, and even well-performing SATA Solid state drives Cons: (not really a con... its more expensive than the optane solution, which i detailed why I couldnt go that route below) I originally didnt want to go this route when deciding what to put in my motherboards single M.2 Slot. (This can be upgraded by using an adapter card in any pcie slot on your motherboard) And I wanted to use an intel optane m.2 memory module to speed up my 2tb large storage drive but the optane memory module will only speed up a system drive that has your operating system on it. This is the big downside to optane, it will ONLY speed up a system drive