SABRENTM.2 NVMe SSD 512GB Internal Solid State 3400MB/s Read, PCIe 3.0 X4 2280, M2 Hard Drive High Performance Compatible with PCs, NUCs Laptops, and Desktops (SB-ROCKET-512)

I have a number of Samsung SATA SSDs and they've always been great. Whilst their NVMe offerings have been getting more competitive on price, I'm not certain their price premium is warranted when it comes to the Ben 3 drives. Sabrent drives have been getting excellent reviews for their performance and that is only enhanced by the competitive prices, backed up by a 5 year warranty, so I was more than happy to make them my first foray into NVMe drives.First up, according to respected reviewers, if you're going to for Gen 4 units then the Samsung 980 Pro is the mack daddy nuts. However it is priced accordingly. Sabrent are reckoned to be almost as good but significantly cheaper, and the same applies here. The drive itself, like all NVMe units, it tiny when you're used to 2.5" form factors and came in a really slinky little metal case which means it was well protected in transit. It was easy to install on my motherboard (Asus Z170 Pro Gaming) and was recognised right away, and the bundled Acronis True Image software was pretty easy to use in order to clone my old boot drive which was running out of space. It's perhaps not quite as good as the Samsung software but easy and quick enough for all but the most demanding users.Once installed the drive performed pretty much bang on the stated specs in a crystal Disk Mark test and I'm pretty sure boot up time has been reduced a little, although that may be my imagination. Still, it shows that if you have an NVMe slot there is no point buying SATA now, the price has come down enough to get excellent and capacious drives for sensible cash. The 5 year warranty and excellent max TBW endurance means I'm confident this will be a worthwhile purchase.

If you're looking for best bang for your buck in terms of both performance and £ per GB for your NVME solution, this is the drive you'll want. It costs almost the same as it's Intel drive counterpart, but offers nearly double the read/write speeds, and offers around 80% of the speeds that the very fastest generation 3 NVME drives can offer. It's a very good value compromise between those two metrics.For now, to get the most out of the performance these drives can give, you'll need to be dealing with a lot of large single file transfers, or work with HD/4k video & other media material. If you plan on having this for only gaming purposes, it will speed up things like install and game loading times, but it will not improve your frames per second rate or anything like that. For now, you will mostly get the same value and performance from a regular SSD, of course, NVME drives have a much smaller profile inside your PC case, so that may be another factor you might want to consider. I've tried running Witcher 3 on this drive and it loads pretty much instantly, and loading a saved game is exceptionally quick.I do work with large video/media files, and these drives have a super-fast cache that amounts to usually 20% of the overall size of the drive, so around 400GB of the 2TB drives I have, with my USB 3.0 media backup drives, I can get a data transfer speed of nearly 2GB/second for the first 400GB or so of data I transfer, so using them is very quick and painless.5 year warranty on offer provided you register with Sabrent within 90 days of purchase. Tech support with them has been speedy & courteous when I've dealt with them, and firmware for the drive can always be upgraded even if the drive has data on it, as the software is stored on a separate chip on the drive.Great kit for those that will look to make the most of it, just make sure before buying that you'll be doing tasks that will allow you to use high speeds it to the fullest. I'm sure in a short few years, more games and other apps will get tailored to work at the ultra-high speeds these drives can operate at.

I got this drive quite some time ago as I was looking to improve my boot times and loading times for games too.I previously ran of another M.2 drive, but with the slower SATA spec. It's made a bit difference for some tasks, and little differences for others, which exactly what I expected.For booting into windows 10, my computer used to spend around 5 or 10 seconds on the little logo with the spinning circles, then boot. With the new drive, those little circles don't even show up unless I've just installed an update or something. It goes straight from manufacturer logo to log in. Awesome.Games have seen some big gains too, more than I thought. Some games are loading twice as fast, some are 3 or 4 times faster. I've got the Witcher 3 doing fast travel in 3 seconds. I wish I tested the older drive, but it used to be around 10 or 15 seconds from what I recall. Don't even get enough time to grab a biscuit now!For other tasks like day to day browsing, moving through the OS, it's fairly similar, perhaps a little snappier at times. If that's all you do, an NVMe isn't really something you'll see much benefit in, and a standard SSD will do.I'm really happy with this though, it's been in my machine since I picked it up, it's been flawless, seen it's fair share of file transfers, game installs, etc, and it's still going with no signs of slowing down yet. Sabrent wasn't a company I really knew much about when I got this drive, so I was taking a change on it, and I'm happy I did. They've shown them selves to be really competitive if the SSD space, and I'll be picking up one of their rocket SSD's for my next build.