You really need to do your research here for this one it's not like adding a normal SSD
1) Make sure you have the right slot on your motherboard or get a PCIE adapter (which is just as fast as motherboard slot)
2) Make sure that your motherboard supports the full bandwidth PCIE 3.0 x4 rather than x2 or else you wont get the full speed out of the memory
3) Make sure your bios is NVME compatible not just AHCI
4) make sure you have adequate cooling for this which they don't make easy because they void warranted for removing the sticker across the memory modules. Otherwise you can run up against thermal throttling (slowing down when it gets hot). I made a little custom heat spreader with a small piece of copper plate I go from ebay and thermal grease under the motherboard it also makes contact with the case further cooling the memory really works a treat.

5) Make sure you unplug other storage drive before installing window on it

The drive is blazing fast and it does make a difference on booting windows 10 and loading games I have the 250gb version of this drive with ASROCK Z170 Gaming-ITX/AC motherboard. seeing I was putting it in an ITX case. Speed test show I'm getting full speed and the 500GB version is even a little faster.

Now £240.78 at Ballicom

I have my OS, programs and steam games on my SSD, all my files on my mechanical drives. Would having steam games on a mechanical drive be a benefit, I would have thought that would create a negative effect on performance.

Don't be silly. See Spudzy's comment. Nothing to do with bottle half empty/full.

Sata SSD is plenty fast for most use cases think this is an enthusiast part

Well yes, it is dependent on what you do on the PC, like having various pieces of very expensive but amazing software, for the average Joe though (me) SATA SSD's are just fine.

What does that even mean :smile:

these things are great, as long as you specify the compatible parts. I built a PC for a family member for Christmas with one of these for a system drive and a secondary ssd for a second drive. the numbers say it all..

https://www.dropbox.com/s/xrp3nm5cgfkhxos/benchmark.png?dl=0

If you are looking at getting this just to make booting and using windows faster than you must have a lot of disposable income. I envy you.

There's many use cases where a single standard SSD is literally too slow. These NVME SSDs are fantastic and when you compare them to RAID 0'ing multiple SATA SSDs to get the speed you need, the price is pretty cheap too.

Bought this for £320 the week it was released - it's boom fast. Heat.

Seems to be a lot of hassle, not to mention money, to gain some seconds in booting up etc.

I know Apple take a lot of flak on here but my two and a half year old MacBook Air has one of these types of SSD and the speed is incredible. It makes up I am sure for some of the defecit in overall horsepower because of being a slim ultrabook.

I see both read and write speeds according to the disk benchmark tool of 730MB/sec!

I guess not that fast by today's standards but when I got it that was crazy speed.

I used a new install of Win 10 which started up within seconds so I had no metric upon which to base it's performance. I would guess it took around 8 seconds to get to the login screen with the wifi connected (something which win 10 does somehow).

I regretted handing over the PC as it makes mine look quite sad!

Well then, apparently they split their only prophylactic. Read the Anandtech review. They throttle under stress, and heatsinks do make a difference.

It has thermal throttling instead of cooling. The drive's controller has the capacity to slow it down, being CPU technology and all that.

You really need to do your research here for this one it's not like adding a normal SSD
1) Make sure you have the right slot on your motherboard or get a PCIE adapter (which is just as fast as motherboard slot)
2) Make sure that your motherboard supports the full bandwidth PCIE 3.0 x4 rather than x2 or else you wont get the full speed out of the memory
3) Make sure your bios is NVME compatible not just AHCI
4) make sure you have adequate cooling for this which they don't make easy because they void warranted for removing the sticker across the memory modules. Otherwise you can run up against thermal throttling (slowing down when it gets hot). I made a little custom heat spreader with a small piece of copper plate I go from ebay and thermal grease under the motherboard it also makes contact with the case further cooling the memory really works a treat.

5) Make sure you unplug other storage drive before installing window on it

The drive is blazing fast and it does make a difference on booting windows 10 and loading games I have the 250gb version of this drive with ASROCK Z170 Gaming-ITX/AC motherboard. seeing I was putting it in an ITX case. Speed test show I'm getting full speed and the 500GB version is even a little faster.

To be fair I have my OS and programs on my SSD and my games and Steam Library on a mechanical drive. I've never had any problems.

Most store the OS on SSD and the games on HDD. Seems such a long time since I've had the OS on a HDD.

oh and you need a uefi bios too..

m.2 is confusing because of the sizing scheme.. plus pcie2 and pcie3 (even though that dosen't matter as much)

:confused:

Duuh! Didn't I say that???????

Missing from the OP is the all important physical size as M.2 slots are a complete mess:
This 2280 so that's 80mm long. Aside from being PCIe and not SATA, a lot of laptops would not be physically be able to fit these.
Like I said, M.2 is real mess of a specification. My current favourite example being the HP Elitebook 840 G1/G2 (think 820 and 850 would be the same), where HP despite having 60mm space decided to only give a 42mm slot, which they changed in the G2 revision despite their otherwise identical layout:

Anyway this probably all academic since aside from being PCIe these have 8.9W peak power consumption and are probably not suitable for ultrabooks and probably require some kind of cooling:
http://anandtech.com/show/9702/samsung-950-pro-ssd-review-256gb-512gb
Not voted either way.

Depends on the game but I don't think even SATA SSD's are worth it in most cases for games compared to the £/GB HDD's give us at the moment.

On paper these drives should be quick, but not sure that they make that much difference to game load times?

Your motherboard has to support them, if not you can buy adapters but I don't think they run as fast?

Seriously fast, lowest price I've seen. Hot.