Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD 2TB - M.2 NVMe Interface Internal Solid State Drive with V-NAND Technology (MZ-V7S2T0B/AM)

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We also make sure to measure the SSD's heat and controller-reported data on how much data has been written to the drive and how much life the drive has left before failing to determine whether the manufacturer's claimed endurance measures up to the time the drive itself estimates it has left.

M.2 drive length isn't always an indicator of drive capacity, but therearelimits to NAND-chip density and how many memory modules engineers can stuff onto a PCB of a given size. As a result, most of the M.2 drives we've seen to date have topped out at 2TB, though you can find a few 4TB and 8TB models at lofty prices. The typical capacity waypoints are as follows:It's also pretty speedy in random workloads, which will make for a snappier system. It comes in at 75MB/s read and 291MB/s, which is in the mix with some of the faster Gen4 and first-wave Gen5 drives we've tested. Know which bus you're on.In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in. Finally, on the speeds and feeds, this 2TB drive is rated at 1,200TB for write endurance. As it happens, that's precisely the same as the new Samsung 990 Pro 2TB. But it's also far from some other competing M.2 SSDs.

Of course, to show off the lighting, you will need to have an open-frame rig, or one with a see-through case. If you've already RGB'd your keyboard, mouse, video card, motherboard, case, and headphones, and are at a loss for what's left, the Spectrix S40G makes enough sense both in performance and looks to belong in any lighting-obsessed custom PC builder's arsenal. In need of a lot more storage capacity? Look no further than the Lexar NM790. Available with up to four terabytes of storage, there's really no need to worry about your burgeoning Steam library any longer with one of these installed in your PC. Furthermore, the SN850 shines when integrated with a PlayStation 5, registering read speeds of about 6,550MB/s, enhancing game load times on the PS5 over integrated console storage. Finally, we use the drive as our primary SSD in our workstation PC (and video game console, if appropriate) to assess the real world use of the drive. The XS70 is priced well for a high-performance 2TB SSD, but there's fierce competition from other third-party SSD makers in this price range.The Silicon Power XS70 2TB SSD is a 2280 (80mm length) M.2 PCIe NVMe drive. It combines Micron 176-Layer TLC NAND with a Phison PS5018-E18 controller and 2GB of DDR4 RAM. That combination is common to many of the best SSDs, including the highly regarded Seagate FireCuda 530 and Kingston KC3000.Reduced operating temps are another clear benefit of this new drive. The old SN850 hit a toasty 77°C. The new drive hits just 58°C under sustained load. That's a very worthwhile improvement. Elsewhere, the gains are less obvious, albeit the SN850 was already a great drive. The 4K random access results are a little disappointing, showing little to no improvement. Likewise, don't expect big gains in system-wide measures of performance like PCMark 10. As for the actual flash memory used, it's SK Hynix's latest and very greatest 176-layer 3D TLC NAND. It's about as advanced as TLC memory currently gets, and SK Hynix claims a 40% performance boost over its old 128-layer chips. The net result is sequential read and write specs for this 2TB model of 7,000MB/s and 6,500MB/s respectively. Even in mSATA's heyday, though, a replacement was in the works. During development, it was known as NGFF, for "Next-Generation Form Factor." As it took shape, though, it took on its current, final name: M.2. The drives would be smaller, potentially more capacious, and, most important, not necessarily reliant on SATA.