Samsung 960 EVO Series, 250GB PCIe NVMe M.2-2280 Internal Solid State Drive with 512 MB Cache

Warning: Long Review. Context and experience with SSDsI recently purchased this device for my newest Alienware 17R4. Now at two months old and the EVO 960 PCI 1TB SSD, almost a month old, the games I had on the Crucial MX300 2TB SATA 2.5 Inch SSD- CT2050MX300SSD1 were moved to this new 960 EVO and there is a VERY noticeable increase in speed and performance over all compared to the previous Alienware 17 that I still own and installed a Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD (MZ-75E1T0B/AM . I have nothing but good things to say about the 850 as I had made it the boot drive/game drive on the previous system. I decided SSDs were the way to go for this new system. So I bought the Crucial 2TB SSD for the open SATA III port and it worked well enough, but some games were suffering severe lag, and I thought it may be the Crucial SSD, as it was a lot thinner and lighter than the Samsung 850 EVO 2.5inch SSD from the previous system. Turns out it was not the drive but the game itself which had been copied straight from the old system onto the new one, though the game had a severe outdoor lag that the game never had on the previous system. The old one has a 4thGen Core i7 2.80GHz overclocked to 3.2GHz, 16GB DDR3 RAM, 2GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 960m. But looking at the specs, the newer Crucial is just as fast as the SATA III 850 EVO, but cheaper, much lighter, smaller and twice the storage for less $$$ than the 850 EVO cost me (it needs a caddy to fit into the drive space available)..In searching for a replacement drive, this system comes with a 2.5inch drive port (where the Crucial was installed) a boot drive slot for a PCI which currently has a crappy factory 128GB M.2 PCIe SSD which is small and slower by far, another such port where this 960 EVO is now installed, and there is still an open mSATA slot. I plan to replace the boot drive with another one of these same 960 EVOs which will bring my storage to 4TB, the largest I have ever had yet. With the mSATA I'm hoping it will be 5 or 6 TB later. I looked at the Samsung 850 EVO M.2 SATA III, but found it was the same speed as the first SSD on the previous system, though cheaper. It was still more expensive than the Crucial and only 1TB, so I looked into the 960 EVO/PROs, and was surprised how much faster the 960s were compared to the 850 EVO and Crucial SSDs (around 3X faster read/write speeds over both the 2.5inch SATA III and the M.2 SATA III). So I had the choice between the EVO and the PRO, and I saw that the PRO is several hundred dollars more expensive than the EVO for a mere 300MB/s of speed. The EVO is already 3x the speed of the Crucial, and the difference in performance was amazing. Moving 80GB of data used to take about a half hour on the SATA III 850 EVO and Crucial 2TB, now takes 10 minutes or less on the 960 EVO PCIe. This 960 EVO is actually less expensive than the 1TB 850 EVO SATA III I bought in 2015.TL;DR Amazing speed. Perfect for gaming. Buy the 1TB 960 EVO PCIe instead of the 1TB 960 PRO PCIe. The 300 or so MB/s of speed of the PRO is not worth the $120-$150 increased cost. Very happy with the amazing look and performance of my games.

1TB version. Since there are so many good reviews, will just make this specific to my exact usageUsing as boot drive in Lenovo Flex 5 14" Lenovo Flex 5 14-Inch 2-in-1 Laptop, (Intel Core i5-8250U 8GB DDR4 128 GB PCIe SSD Windows 10) 81C90009US. Imaged the original PCIe SSD to the Samsung 960 BEFORE booting the laptop for the first time (done on my desktop with Acronis), ensures there are no issues with Windows or Apps due to a change in hardware because the new SSD is in place BEFORE Windows configures itself for the first time on the laptop.Here are the speeds, first for the M.2 960, then for the 4TB 860 I have in the same machine on the SATA connection. Very nice results, totally satisfied.Samsung 960 EVO Series - 1TB PCIe NVMe - M.2 Internal SSD (MZ-V6E1T0BW)-----------------------------------------------------------------------CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/-----------------------------------------------------------------------* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2782.068 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1822.577 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 713.222 MB/s [ 174126.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 572.475 MB/s [ 139764.4 IOPS] Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 172.916 MB/s [ 42215.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 128.598 MB/s [ 31396.0 IOPS] Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 27.037 MB/s [ 6600.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 70.151 MB/s [ 17126.7 IOPS] Test : 1024 MiB [C: 33.3% (310.2/930.2 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec] Date : 2018/04/09 0:19:20 OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 16299] (x64)Samsung 850 EVO 4TB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD (MZ-75E4T0B/AM)-----------------------------------------------------------------------CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 x64 (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/-----------------------------------------------------------------------* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 557.711 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 532.782 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 403.698 MB/s [ 98559.1 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 356.231 MB/s [ 86970.5 IOPS] Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 146.325 MB/s [ 35723.9 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 121.307 MB/s [ 29616.0 IOPS] Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 34.553 MB/s [ 8435.8 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 92.992 MB/s [ 22703.1 IOPS] Test : 1024 MiB [D: 71.3% (2654.2/3724.9 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec] Date : 2018/04/09 0:28:17 OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 16299] (x64)