Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Great NVMe drive for the price, what wasn't entirely clear upfront is the corners that were cut to get to this attractive price/performance combo. The short answer is this drive has no dedicated dram on board, most Samsung NVMe drives have a dedicated dram chip that is used for buffering command queues, so in the situation where a drive is being asked to pull a bunch of small files all at once or write a bunch of small files all at once the dram helps to queue up these commands and ensure that things get done in as efficient of manner as possible. This drive lacks that dedicated dram, but while historically that has proved to be a detriment to performance Samsung has pulled a rabbit out of a hat here and actually implemented a system that works pretty darn well while utilizing system memory. So in extremely low RAM setups this drive may not perform as well, in most typical cases (8-16GB of system memory) this drive you can expect to perform as well if not slightly better than a 970 Evo NVMe (see picture for benchmark results, the generally slower of the two being my 970 Evo, and the 980 the other). That being said, I'm not sure I'd run this drive as a primary OS drive, or in some kind of home file server or game server situation, but it will do fine as a primary OS drive for most people while not necessarily providing optimal speed, but its definitely at home as a secondary drive to store videos/games/music/photos. If you're looking for a primary drive I'd probably still steer people towards either a 970 Evo (or better) or another drive with dedicated dram, but if you're looking to save a buck with minimal compromises or just need a secondary NVMe drive this will probably tick all of the boxes.