Transcend 256GB Nvme PCIe Gen3 X4 MTE110S M.2 SSD Solid State Drive

Revived my old acer laptop that I thought was never going to function again. Easy to install.

I purchased this drive to use with a Raspberry Pi 4 (4 GB RAM) and paired it with an SSK USB 3 NVMe case+interface. Now, obviously the USB 3 interface slows things down compared to being able to install this directly into a computer with an NVMe interface, but the RPi doesn't have that option.I installed a fresh version of Raspberry Pi OS to the drive and was able to tweak the Pi to boot off of it instead of the default microSD card. And hey, it works really well! Writes and reads are much faster, and programs load much more quickly off the SSD than the microSD card. Furthermore, it's safe to say that read/writes wear will be much better on this SSD than a card, as well.

I made this little SSD my primary boot drive for Windows, and now my computer boots in 5-8 seconds! A remarkable improvement from the minutes spent booting from my previous top tier hard drive disk. And that's with a heavy load of startup applications, without fast-boot enabled. Even when compared to other SSDs (non-NVMe) instead of obviously slow HDDs, the difference in speed is huge. Then there is the very helpful software available for this SSD that lets you track its health. Just icing on the cake!Now, although it does not have the best of the best speeds or storage capacity in the NVMe SSD category, it is still top tier (for the classes of SSDs) and a great value SSD.

Considering what I paid for it, it's a good upgrade from my other budget SATA SSD though at the speeds of solid state drives now, performance difference becomes harder to tell in day-to-day usage.Update: Almost one year to the day, it's still operating as my main OS drive. Write speeds for me aren't as great as I'd like but for purpose and price, this was cheaper than my last SATA SSD with improved read 3x read speeds and 100mb/s faster write speeds so well worth the price. This combined with a Ryzen CPU upgrade made my system so snappy for very little price.Update 2: Almost two years running as my main OS drive. I recently installed Windows 11, so far so good. This drive was meant as a stop-gap solution until I had more money to buy a more expensive NVME but it's still fast enough for me, no complaints. I use a faster Samsung NVME as my games drive anyway.Update 3, March 16 2022: New motherboard, the drive is still hanging in there with 15,600 hours and counting. In this setup I'm using x4 speeds but doesn't seem to make any difference for me, still roughly the same performance. See pic #2.Update 4, Jan 2024: Still going. Although it's now on my backup OS because I needed more space.