Silicon Power 2TB NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4 2280 SSD R/W up to 3,400/3,000MB/s (SU002TBP34A80M28AB)

First tempted by crasy TBW warranty, then realized I will not live long enough to get it worn out. Anyway, works as intended, speeds are satisfactory, total steal for the money. Use it as a second drive in home setup, nothing hardcore.

Lets face it, I bought this because it was so much cheaper than the Samsung. For the money, I think it is a good drive. I have done a lot of benchmarking with this, both synthetic tests and real life tests. It falls a little short in both categories. But the bottom line is, it still beats the pants off my regular SATA SSD. I cant speak for the long term reliability, but I have installed 4 of these and have no problems in the 6 months I have owned them. The smaller NVMes seem to have less cache and less performance than the larger size ones. If you buy a 256GB, it is going to perform worse than the 512GB and 1TB models. The speed degradation is in both peak transfer rate and the sustained performance when copying large files. I got the 512GB one and it will drop off when copying very large files. I am using this to store all my VMs and then load and suspend quite a bit quicker than my standard SATA SSD.

The install process was a breeze. Fired up the benchmarks and it was even a little faster than the manufacturer stated on the box, do not let the basic look of the drive deceive you, this thing is a rocket, for almost everyone I can think of there is no need to spend nearly twice the money on the Samsung drives unless you can truly benefit from it, and no, wanting the Samsung 970 evo plus for a game drive, because it will destroy every other drive, is not reason enough in my opinion, because it will not destroy this drive, they will be nearly identical. At the time of this review, this drive is 114.99 for 1 TB, the 970 evo Plus is 114.94, for half the capacity. I would happily pay 5 cents for twice the storage at almost the same speed every single day. Buy this and enjoy it.

Most All M.2 / NVME drives deliver performance. Silicon Powers 512GB offers everything a Samsung M.2 has at a lower cost. (I own two of these). This review will start out with practical information the moving into the more technical aspect of the SP 512GB NVME drive. This will be a long review. The biggest concern for anyone buying this is: How can I use this if I dont have a slot on my motherboard for a M.2 SSD?. You need to get an adapter like this: QNINE NVME PCIe Adapter, M.2 NVME SSD to PCI Express 3.0 Host Controller Expansion Card This M.2 NVME SSD is the right key for the above adapter. The key is just the notched pattern for the NVME drive. (without getting too technical about it). You can put the drive + adapter into any PC that has a PCI-e slot. BOOTING from the NVME Drive may or may not be supported by your motherboard. Your operating system has to be 84-bit and supports UEFI; Windows 7*, 8*, 8.1* or Windows® 10. (Check your motherboard information about UEFI and NVME) If all this sounds technically confusing you can do this: 1) boot off a regular 2.5 inch SSD drive (have your Operating system on it). 2) install the PCIe adapter + M.2 NVME drive into your PCI-e (x4){version 3.x} slot (check your motherboard specs) 3) make the M.2 a secondary drive like D: or E: or F: (all you have to do is format it, windows will give it the drive letter) 4) install any heavy loading programs on the M.2 I have this above outline configuration. Heavy programs or data goes to my M.2 Drives. You can even get two of these and make the M.2s into a RAID 0 stripped drive for double the speed. My advice is to format the M.2 as ReFS.ReFS protects against data corruption. (see attached image) (SKIP this section if you are not interested in ReFS formatting) Checking if TRIM is set for your ReFS formatted drive: 1) click on start or type in the windows 8/10 search box CMD 2) once you see CMD right click on the black icon and select Run as Administrator 3) type in the black window (Command Prompt) that just opened: a) fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify 1) NTFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (says that TRIM is active for NTFS) 2) ReFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0 ((says that TRIM is active for ReFS) 3) if you get = is not currently set for either NTFS or ReFS You can enable it with the following command: a) fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify ReFS 0 (this will set TRIM for ReFS) b) fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify NTFS 0 (this will set TRIM for ReFS) Silicon Power M.2 NVME Drive: Speeds: (Crystal Disk Mark) {See attached image} (NTFS formatted) - READ and WRITE speeds: 2,000 MB/s (ReFS formatted) - READ speeds: 2,000 MB/s - WRITE speed: 634 MB/S (due to error/checksum checking) Write speeds are slower on ReFS due to error/checksum checking. 634MB/s is still SSD fast. ALL NVME drives are subject to thermal throttling which means once the M.2/NVME drive reaches a certain temperature the onboard chips will throttle down the speed/transfer to save the chips from overheating. Larger, longer transfers will trip the thermal throttling so just be aware it isnt the manufacturers fault but the nature of the NVME design overall (across all manufacturers) My systems have SP SSD drives installed. I do large data transfers almost daily. SP drives keep pace with Samsung on speeds. Reliability cant be gauged on a short-term basis. Most of my drives are a year or younger in age. I do suggest trying either this M.2 drive or one of SPs other SSD drives. If you have an older system that doesnt have PCI-e (3.0) or greater to go with a regular 2.5 SSD drive. You really wont notice the difference. If all this sounds overwhelming find a geeky friend to help you out. I hope this information helps someone out. I always try to revise my reviews as needed.

Ive only had it hooked up so far to a little external NVME case so limited to USB C 10Gb connection. Having said that, I still achieved 1.05GB/sec (8.4Gb) in both read and write using ATTO. Hard to complain about that. Amazing performance for the money. Ill be using it for a new build in a couple of months when I get the new AMD Zen 2 chip. Highly recommended!! Its now over 3 months later and I installed this drive in a new 3700X build 2 months ago. I had zero problems loading Windows 10 Pro, software, drivers, etc. on it. I was literally up and running in about half an hour and spent a few more hours loading up software and updates. Completely painless. Ive had zero problems so far and my new Asus MB X570e-Gaming motherboard has heatsinks for the M.2 drives. I have not been able to throttle the drive no matter how hard I work it. Love this drive especially at the price I paid. Insane and highly highly recommended!!

I started using it. Works great

I tested this drive with crystal disk mark, the read speed is 3500mb and the write speed is 2100mb i purchased the 500gb a80 this drive also comes with dram. I am using this hdd for my Operating system and it is running super smooth on windows 11

Ive been using it as my main drive for the last 3 years without any issues, can recommend and its great value for money compared to other options on the market.

Samsung is no longer the only game in town... Or maybe they are. This thing probably uses Samsung chips. In any event, I dropped this in and cloned my 512GB Samsung 860 Pro over to it using Macrium Reflect. I extended the partition to use the whole 2TB. Then removed the Samsung and rebooted. It was like I never messed with it, except I now have 2TB of space instead of 1/4 of that. Beautiful. Being able to have and run everything from one main drive, and backup literally that one and only main drive has simplified things. And, reducing complexity in storage and backup is necessarily an increase in data security. The less there is to go wrong, the less that will go wrong. I am very happy with this.

The whole reason I bought this drive was because of the YouTube installation video I found where the owner specifically installed this drive on an X1 Extreme. The installation was easy, but I will advise any other X1X users out there to make sure they do not strip their screws! The manufacturer used way too much loctite on these screws so I ended up having to use needle nose pliers. Other than that it is running great and the storage is exactly the same as other drives I have used. Similar speeds for a fraction of the cost.