ADATA XPG Gammix S5, 256GB NVMe M.2 2280 Internal Solid State Drive

Are there faster SSD's out there? Sure. But in my opinion, if you aren't building a top of the line machine, this and maybe a nice hdd is all you will need. Bear in mind that there have been lemons in the batch, so I suggest having the company's information down if you decide to buy. Usually it works great, but a price this nice, even in covid times, comes with an ounce of risk.I bought the 256gb NVMe M.2 SSD at 2100/1500 mb/s. It installed easy on my budget machine, I put the OS onto it and a few other files, put less important stuff onto a 2tb HDD.Gotta say, I have never had an issue with this drive. Fantastic stuff for the price. Computer boots quickly, and runs very well even under load. So happy I didn't go the SATA SSD route. Just make sure you install it in the right slot. On my mobo there are two M.2 slots, but only the one closest to the CPU is NVMe compatible.

This SSD is nearly as fast as the Samsung 970 PRO, but it's $60 cheaper (for the 512 GB size). It's also $30 cheaper than the 970 EVO. I'm not comparing claimed speeds, but the real world speeds from Crystal Disk Mark. Check out my results (pictured) and then compare them to the uploaded pictures on the Samsung reviews. The XPG Gammix S11 is only a little slower in sequential read/write, and even beats the Samsung in some of the random read/writes at lower queue depths.The S11's price to performance value can't be beat if you want a super fast SSD. I realize that the Samsung drives will probably last a *little* longer, but consider that you are basically trading a 5% speed decrease and 5% reliability decrease for a >30% price decrease. With that said, if you are paranoid about reliability, take the money you saved and buy a regular HDD and do weekly backups. That will result in a setup that is even more reliable than just a single Samsung SSD.For normal users, this drive is probably more than you need, but it's nice to have. With Fast Boot turned on in my BIOS, my computer boots in seconds. I haven't timed it, but it's fast enough that I don't bother with "hybrid sleep" and just shut my computer down when I don't want it. Video games load in seconds. Transfers to external drives over USB 3.1 are pretty much always limited by the speed of the external drive, only an external NVME drive of comparable speed can keep up. Transfers over my home network are always limited by the speed of my connection.For "power" users (I'm a statistician and analyze a lot of data), this drive is nice. Multi GB datasets can be saved and loaded to disk in the blink of an eye. It's common to think of things in a speed/memory tradeoff, and having a fast and fairly large SSD often tilts my thinking towards saving a single dataset in multiple stages of processing- it's almost always faster to load the file I snapshotted after "step 5" instead of re-running steps 1-5 again on the original data. It's nice to have a drive that's fast and large enough to enable this kind of frivolous behavior (which we never even dreamed of in the 90's). I use a regular HDD for archiving old projects, and keep my current projects on this drive for fast analysis. It's agonizing to switch to an old project on the HDD- being able to read100 MB/s used to feel fast, but now feels like I'm going die of old age before the data gets loaded.

I bought this drive for my motherboard's second available nvme 2 port. The first one has been already occupied with a Samsung 970 Evo Plus which runs the OS and all important programs. This drive would be mostly for backup and important data files that I store and work with for my job. I bought this drive after doing my own research to find the fastest and most affordable nvme 2 drive I could find in the market. I really didn't expect the results as high as what I got with my Samsung main drive but surprisingly I saw a very close performance results on this new comer drive. The installation was super easy since I had the port available and ready to go. I also had the extra screw for this second drive which came with my motherboard. The bois shows it detects the drive instantly and after preparations on Windows, the drive was just ready to be used. The results of three separate benchmarks, Samsung Magician and ADATA ssd toolbox and Crystal Disk shows numbers very close to the overall performance with Samsung 970 Evo Plus and this is impressive based on the price range. Both drives are 1 TB capacity but price differences are decent (about $70 difference). I also knew that my second available nvme 2 port on my drive would not be as fast as the first one based on the manufactures testimony, but again the benchmark results proves that ADATA makes drives as powerful as SAMSUNG. The only question here left without any answer is reliability and this needs time. I will post here if I notices anything wrong with this drive in the future.For Now, I would highly recommend this drive for whoever follows and cares about my posts.

A long, long time ago I had to buy a flash drive for school. I paid $89 for an 8GB drive, making $5/hour that HURT.Now, this bad boy. I didn’t know anything about NVMe until I started building my new rig. I also had no CLUE how small this really was, it was delivered with other parts and I panicked because I didn’t see it. It’s between and Airhead and a stick of gum. Freaking cool. The metallic red looks awesome on my motherboard and I didn’t have to worry about cabling since it plugs in directly to the mobo.Install was easy. Loading OS went smoothly. Runs like a champ, given I mostly game but I’ve been working with Cura and learning to use Blender so I have it about 80% full already.Read/write speeds are sick. Opening programs takes no time, saving huge files takes no time, and moving large files around is no problem. (Looking at you, Cura).Seriously though, just buy it. ESPECIALLY if you’re building a new rig. It’s worth every penny. I’ll never go back to old solid state drives, much less SATA.