Silicon Power 1TB PCIe 3.0 x4 Based NVMe M.2-2280 Internal Solid State Drive

I have been using this SSD for over a year and it has been wonderful! lifespan is still 99% blazing quick and very affordable. Extremely happy of this purchase.

I download about 6 Tb of data each month and that data is stored on two 32 Tb external drive enclosures with four much slower 8 Tb traditional 3.5-inch mechanical drives. The speed at which the data comes in is much too fast for the enclosures to write the data in real time creating a huge bottleneck. So instead of writing directly to the enclosures, I used my solid state NVME drive to a large cache the incoming data as it comes in. Then the data from that cache will trickle the content to my enclosures. But there was still bottlenecking and some latency when I was just using one of these Silicon Power NVME drives. So, I purchased another one and a PCI-E to NVME m.2 adapter. I created the RAID 0 in my BIOS so that the two drives would double my storage space, but also increase the read/write speed. After installing my OS and updating all the drivers and software, I ran a benchmark on the RAID 0 and was extremely pleased to see how much faster two of these Silicon Power NVME drives performed together please see the screen capture that I uploaded. For my purposed, this setup work great. I have the RAID split into two partitions. The smaller one has my OS and apps installed on it. The much larger second partition is set aside for some backup storage, but it also serves as the first place my downloads are stored prior to being sent to my external drives for permanent storage. With the price of 2 Tb PCi-e Gen 4 drives hovering around $400 and the price of one of these 1 Tb drives at $99 at the time of this writing, using two of these drives was much less expensive even when the PCI-e to m.2 NVME adapter which cost about $20 was included in order to create the array. So, for almost half the price of a gen 4 2 Tb drive, I was able to get the same high performance at about half the price. For my needs, Silicon Power came through for me and I couldn't be happier because the bottle neck is gone!

First nvme and my god have the prices come into reality. This kind of nvme was easily $500 about 2 years ago. Absolutely blazing fast, phenomenal price for the performance. Get one, in fact get two. Don't buy a heatsink, the 'label' is actually a very well designed heat spreader. The memory likes to run hot while writing like 50-70C, while the controller likes to be cold. The controller heats up, which then spreads to the memory through the heatspreading label and helps to bring the memory temps up. Because lets be honest this thing won't be writing for more than a few seconds at a time. If you cool your memory and lets say it never gets above 40C while writing, you'll be damaging your drives longevity writing below optimal temperatures. Don't bother even buying a heatsink with the thermal tape and cutting in so it only touches the controller because then the heat from the controller still won't be spreading to help bring the memory temps up from ambient to where they like to be. That little metal label is actually pure genius, very simple and keeps your drive healthy. The only time it would probably be worth to cool your nvme controller more aggressively is if you're writing 24/7 with it at which point the memory will heat up enough on its own and stay there over long periods and you can really crank down on the controller to keep it from throttling.

In image 1 is the Silicon Power 1TB NVMe Gen3 x4. Image 2 is my Samsung 850 EVO 500GB 2.5" SATA SSD for a side-by-side comparison. Well, if you could call it a comparison. This NVMe completely obliterated it.The NVMe is on a Gigabyte Aorus Elite X570 ATX motherboard with a Ryzen 7 3700X CPU. Running Windows 10 64-bit update 18363.592. I'm using the board's included M.2 heat sink. The NVMe drive sits just above a rather warm Gigabyte R9 390. Thermals have stayed manageable and speeds have been as expected with no issues. I moved my Arch Linux installation to a little over half of the NVMe and it's running exceptionally well.You can see from the 3rd image that the NVMe ran cooler than the 2.5" Samsung SSD. M.2s can benefit a lot from the airflow of being on the motherboard rather than in the PSU shroud or behind the motherboard panel, where a traditional 2.5" drive would often find itself. I have it installed in an NZXT H510 case with 3x 120mm PWM fans (1800 RPM max) and 1x stock 120mm DC /w voltage control fan (1500 RPM max). Fans are configured for a positive pressure, with the rear PWM fan as exhaust, single top DC fan as intake over the CPU, and 2 front PWM fans as intake. The Samsung SSD is behind the motherboard panel and installed on a modular tray. I've been using the drives for various tasks throughout the day, including the CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 bench. HWMonitor was up and recording max temps during that time.Verdict: BUY