ADATA XPG S40G, 512GB RGB PCIe Gen3 x4 NVMe M.2-2280 Internal Solid State Drive

Adata drives has proven to be highly reliable drives and an excellent price point over the past five or six years that I've been using them.

Fresh installed windows onto this drive. Everything worked flawlessly. Very fast boot up. The RGB colors are fairly bright. I can't tell much difference between the brightness of my other peripherals and it. So, no complaints there. It also syncs with my ASRock motherboard and the polychrome software. (now if only the polychrome software would work consistently!)One thing to note about this drive: the RGB heat sink on top about triples the overall thickness of the drive. If you have a motherboard like mine, that extra thickness may create an issue. Some motherboards have a protective plate that covers the M2 slots. This particular card will not fit under that plate. This was something that I hadn't thought about and I didn't see any reviews addressing this issue. Thankfully, my motherboard has an additional M2 slot that isn't under the plate and everything worked out.My system specs:OS-Windows 10Motherboard-ASRock B550M Steel LegendCPU-AMD Ryzen 5 3600RAM-GSkill Tridentz 16GBGPU-ASRock RX 5700 XT TaichiStorage-500GB M2, 250GB SSD, (2) 1TB HDD

I like the RGB and the speeds are as advertised. I have an ASUS TUF x570 Wifi motherboard with Aura Sync which is suppose to be compatible, but.......when Aura Sync is turned on for the XPG S40G my speeds drop in half. When I turn it off everything goes back to advertised speeds. I have the latest firmware for the XPG S40G and Aura Sync. I am not sure who to point the finger at or where to start with support, but I can confirm this issue only happens when Aura sync is set to control the lights on my XPG S40G. This is unfortunate because I was hoping to be able to use Aura Sync to control all my lights, but right now its broken. I do not really want to install the software specific to the XPG S40G because its just one more RGB program to run in the background (with my ram, cpu cooler, XPG S40G, graphics card, case fans, ect theres just too many RGB programs). Although I have not tried the software specific to the XPG S40G to see if the issue also happens with it enabled. I will try this when I get home. I will keep this review at 3 stars because one of the main points to ordering this over other options was the ability to use Aura Sync, otherwise I would give this 5 stars. I do not have heat issues with this drive either and it is located right between my Ryzen 3800x CPU and 2070 super graphics card.Update: Fix for speed issues and aura sync: Make sure m2 is unchecked in the aura sync software. Install the XPG rgb software from the manufacturers website. Reboot pc and go back to aura sync software. You should see a new option for hard drive/ssd that you can enable which will control the rgb lights but not cause speed issues with the ssd.

The media could not be loaded. Mind you, this was the first time that I've ever held a pcie m.2 ssd. I don't know why. But I expected it to be larger. I suppose that good things come in small packages. That aside, it installed easily onto my mobo, and is ridiculously fast. It has sequential write speeds of 1,014mbps and sequential read speeds of 1,568mbps. It is my system drive and boots windows 10 in 10 seconds, literally. Yes I timed it. It's also excellent in use with my data heavy applications and games. Adobe CS is lightning fast on this tiny ssd. The icing on the cake is that the rgb looks sweet and it synchronizes seamlessly with ASUS Aura.