Slightly less edifying are the P41's operating temps. At a 71°C peak, it's a little toastier than we'd ideally like. Not that we saw any signs of any thermal throttling. But temps that high is a teensy bit of a long-term reliability concern. EXCERIA PLUS G2 SSD / EXCERIA PLUS SSD / EXCERIA SSD: 4KiB random performance is measured with CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64, Q=32,T=8. Know which bus you're on. In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in. Rather more specific to this WD drive is the latest 2.0 version of the company's Game Mode drive management software. WD claims it improves game loading times courtesy of a so-called "read look-ahead" algorithm, which predictively caches game data. It now runs automatically, detecting when games are loaded. How much that kind of feature actually makes a difference in the real world is notoriously difficult to pin down. But it's unlikely to be revolutionary. RoHS Directive: KIOXIA Corporation defines “RoHS Directive” as the DIRECTIVE 2011/65/EU OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL of 8 June 2011 on the restriction of the use of certain hazardous substances in electrical and electronic equipment.

M.2 drive length isn't always an indicator of drive capacity, but there are limits to NAND-chip density and how many memory modules engineers can stuff onto a PCB of a given size. As a result, most of the M.2 drives we've seen to date have topped out at 2TB, though you can find a few 4TB and 8TB models at lofty prices. The typical capacity waypoints are as follows: For most PC applications, that probably doesn't matter. But for small form factor rigs and perhaps a gaming laptop, every little can undoubtedly help. On that note, for most applications, we'd probably go for the cheaper bare drive rather than this more expensive model with its heat spreader. The revised SN850X is inherently a cooler-running thing, after all. The NVMe, or Non-Volatile Memory Express interface, has been designed specifically with solid state drives in mind. In contrast, SATA, the previous interface in charge, was built to cater to most HDDs. The thought is, at the time, that no storage would ever need to exceed its lofty max bandwidth. To the surprise of a few, new storage mediums such as solid state absolutely blaze past SATA's max bandwidth, and so a new protocol in NVMe was born.Of course, to show off the lighting, you will need to have an open-frame rig, or one with a see-through case. If you've already RGB'd your keyboard, mouse, video card, motherboard, case, and headphones, and are at a loss for what's left, the Spectrix S40G makes enough sense both in performance and looks to belong in any lighting-obsessed custom PC builder's arsenal. If you're a custom PC builder with RGB-lighting fever, and have RGB-ified just about every inch and corner of your system, perk up: ADATA has brought pretty lights to the internal SSD final frontier. The XPG Spectrix S40G is the most flamboyant NVMe drive we've seen to date. With its exceptional 4K write speeds, top-notch sequential-read speeds, and respectable durability rating, ADATA makes having a top-of-the line, over-the-top SSD affordable and fun, in one fell swoop. Who It's For The XS70 is designed with PS5 compatibility in mind so the heatsink isn’t as bulky as some others you might come across. It really does look good. Admittedly I'm talking about an SSD here, and its not the kind of thing you'll spend time looking at, but Silicon Power's designers deserve credit.

As for the actual flash memory used, it's SK Hynix's latest and very greatest 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. It's about as advanced as TLC memory currently gets, and SK Hynix claims a 40% performance boost over its old 128-layer chips. The net result is sequential read and write specs for this 2TB model of 7,000MB/s and 6,500MB/s respectively. We mentioned NVMe above. NVMe is another technical hurdle to consider, because systems and motherboards need board-level support for these drives to be bootable. All late-model motherboards now support NVMe M.2 drives, but older boards are not guaranteed to support booting from an NVMe-based drive. Outside of new motherboards, these high-bandwidth, NVMe-capable slots are also found in some recent laptops. Also note that in some cases, a laptop may support a PCI Express NVMe drive, but it may be soldered to the motherboard and thus not upgradable. So, if you're thinking of upgrading a recent laptop or convertible, be sure to consult your manual very closely before buying one of these drives. One last caveat to drop in before we get to our product recommendations surrounds Intel's SSD line. Intel for a while sold a family of M.2-based storage products under the brand name Optane, in two very distinct types of drive. Intel's Optane SSDs are SSDs like any other, bootable drives that can serve as a stand-alone boot drive or as secondary storage. They were discontinued for consumers in 2021, but you may still see them around. (Incidentally, Intel ultimately sold its SSD business at the end of 2021 to SK Hynix, which has spun it off into a new Hynix subsidiary, Solidigm.) In need of a lot more storage capacity? Look no further than the Lexar NM790. Available with up to four terabytes of storage, there's really no need to worry about your burgeoning Steam library any longer with one of these installed in your PC. Welcome to the cutting edge! You're shopping for a kind of drive that many folks don't even realize exists. As a result, you need to pay attention to several factors that may not be documented very well while you shop. Let's recap.

In other words, while the speed freak in me loves what NVMe brings to the table, I recognize that in practice, it's usually not that noticeable. If you're looking to get the most from your money when it comes time to build a gaming PC, good SATA SSDs remain an excellent option, with prices now falling below 10 cents per GB. These values are the best values obtained in a specific test environment at KIOXIA Corporation and KIOXIA Corporation warrant neither read nor write speeds in individual devices. Read and write speed may vary depending on a device used and file size read or written. The main way it achieves this is by being a DRAM-less SSD drive. This saves a big chunk of the manufacturer's bill of materials, and thanks to advances in the latest controllers, it can be surprising how little impact this has on performance. Such drives are slower, don't get me wrong, but this new SN770 still quotes read and writes of 5,150MB/s and 4,900MB/s, respectively. Not bad. EXCERIA PRO SSD/ EXCERIA G2 SSD: 4KiB random performance is measured with CrystalDiskMark 8.0.1 x64, Q=32,T=16. We actually like these because often, you often get a robust heat sink on the M.2 drive. Some PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs can run hot under sustained read/write tasks and throttle their speed. That said, unless you're running a server or something similar, where a drive is constantly getting hammered with reads and writes, that's usually not something you have to worry about. That's because many of these drives are so fast, they get their transfer duties done before they have a chance to get all that hot.

KIOXIA Corporation defines “RoHS Compatible” products as products that either ( i ) contain no more than a maximum concentration value of 0.1% by weight in Homogeneous Materials for lead, mercury, hexavalent chromium, polybrominated biphenyls (PBBs), polybrominated diphenyl ethers (PBDEs), bis(2-ethylhexyl) phthalate (DEHP), dibutyl phthalate (DBP), benzyl butyl phthalate (BBP) and diisobutyl phthalate (DIBP) and of 0.01% by weight in Homogeneous Materials for cadmium; or ( ii ) fall within any of the application exemptions set forth in the Annex to the RoHS Directive(*). This does not mean that Kioxia Corporation products labeled “RoHS COMPATIBLE” are entirely free of substances controlled by the RoHS Directive and does not constitute a warranty or guarantee that such products will comply with the specific laws and/or regulations adopted in any particular jurisdiction. EXCERIA PRO SSD / EXCERIA G2 SSD: Sequential speeds are measured with CrystalDiskMark 8.0.1 x64, Q=32, T=1. The market has settled on 22mm wide as the standard for desktop and laptop implementations; the aftermarket drives available and the accessible slots we've seen have all been that width. The most common lengths we've seen are 80mm ("Type-2280") and 60mm ("Type-2260"). The lengthier the drive, the more NAND chips you can tend to stuff on it (plus, M.2 drives can be single- or double-sided), though know that length isn't an absolute measure of capacity. 42mm, 60mm, and 80mm M.2 SSDs South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix is a relative newcomer to the consumer solid-state drive market, but you would never know that based on its first offerings. The SK Hynix Platinum P41, a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, is its best yet. It dominated our PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage benchmark testing, setting several new records in the process. The P41 supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. SK Hynix provides a clone utility tool, the SK Hynix System Migration Utility, for its SSDs, in addition to Easy Drive Manager software, which lets you see detailed information on drive health, run diagnostics, and erase the drive. And the P41 can be had for a very reasonable price in its 1TB and 2TB capacities. Who It's ForDefinition of capacity: KIOXIA defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1GB = 2 It's worth noting that this drive can get hot when pushed, just like the SN850. It hit 76°C after a long day of testing, but without direct cooling on it, not even a heatsink. It should be fine in most systems, especially if your motherboard does come with some cooling solution. The first attempt was a new form factor called mini-SATA, or mSATA. The boiled-down essence of an SSD with the shell removed, an mSATA drive is a bare, rectangular circuit board. (Most mSATA drives relevant to upgraders measure about 1 by 2 inches.) mSATA drives fit into a special slot in a laptop's logic board or on a PC motherboard. As the name suggests, the slot is a conduit to the Serial ATA bus in the system. The interface on the drive end is an edge connector on the PCB, as opposed to the usual SATA cabling. The mSATA drive also draws all the power it needs through the slot.