MyDigitalSSD SBX Single Sided 80mm (2280) M.2 PCI Express 3.0 x2 (PCIe Gen3 x2) NVMe SSD (1TB)

Excellent M.2 drive.Installed it in a new Lenovo Flex 14" 2-in-1 laptop I got for Christmas. Had already replaced the stock 1TB rotating drive with a 256Gb Toshiba SSD for Windows 10, but wanted another drive for Linux.Installed this drive and booted to a Live Linux USB. Took like 10 minutes to install Linux on this drive and reboot.Boot time is down to like 4 seconds from Grub Boot loader screen to login screen. I get nearly 5 to 6 hours on Linux depending on what I am doing.This drive is super responsive and above all, DOES NOT GET HOT like a lot of the M.2 drives I have read about. Having all memory chips on the one side makes installing it much easier than the double sides drives.Would certainly recommend this to anyone wanting a solid M.2 drive at a great price point.

I got 512GB which I installed in my new Dell XPS 13 9360. Installation went without a problem. I'm getting good results considering that 9360 cannot run much faster anyway.

The difference (notches) relates to compatability with the PCIe and/or controller.Remember, M.2 is just the form factor. M.2 drives can come in SATA versions (like the Crucial MX300 M.2 for example) and NVMe versions (like the Samsung 960 Pro), which describes the bus they use to electrically communicate with the other PC components. SATA M.2 SSD drives and 2.5” SATA SSDs actually operate at virtually identical spec. NVMe M.2’s on the other hand, definitely do not.Modern motherboards use SATA III which maxes out at a throughput of 600MB/s (or 300MB/s for SATA II, in which case, it’s time to upgrade). Via that connection, most SSDs will provide Read/Write speeds in the neighborhood of 530/500 MB/s. For comparison, a 7200 RPM SATA drive manages around 100MB/s depending on age, condition, and level of fragmentation. NVMe drives, on the other hand, provide write speeds as high as 3500MB/s. That’s 7x over SATA SSDs!

NEW REVIEW: Please see my original review. The customer service of MyDigitalSSD was very prompt and courteous about the issue and I give them 5-stars just for that. See the comments below. They sent me a new unit with the updated firmware FW 11.5, which has fixed the issue I was facing with my Intel NUC. The speed numbers are still looking great for the price with an outstanding performance/price ratio. With this updated firmware, I would definitely recommend getting this SSD. I changed my original 3-Star rating to a 5-Star rating.ORIGINAL REVIEW: Got the 128 GB for my Intel NUC7i7BNH as a Windows 10 boot drive. The drive initially worked as expected with good speed numbers for the price. However, there is a bug in the drive firmware where the NUC BIOS fails to detect it after every shut down, requiring me to power-cycle my NUC to get it to detect the boot drive. That was an inexcusable nuisance and I had to return this drive. To confirm that this is indeed a fault of the drive and not my NUC unit, I subsequently tested with an used ADATA SU800 M.2 SATA and a new Samsung 970 Evo NVME with no such issues at all. I am currently running the 970 Evo and couldn't me more happy. I don't know if the firmware bug is more prevalent or is specific to Intel NUC's, but if this issue is fixed, this would be a decent and cheap NVME drive.

I'll keep this review short since: #1. Most of the other reviews are exactly in-line. #2. Mostly covering performance on an outdated Intel chipset.I have an older Intel i7-4790K Devil's Canyon CPU on an Intel Z97 chipset which was one of the first chipsets to support NVMe through UEFI updates from motherboard manufacturers. The ASRock Z97 Pro4 motherboard I have has an M.2 slot, albeit limited to PCIe Gen2 x2 vs. PCIe Gen3 x4 available on most newer motherboards at the time of this review. In a nutshell, PCIe Gen2 x2 has a maximum bandwidth of 500MB/s x2, or 1GB/s total. You add overhead of NVMe, you can see in the included photo the maximum read speed is about 826MB/s. — For reference, PCIe Gen3 x4 is 1000MB/s x4, or 4GB/s.Obviously, on PCIe Gen2 x2 of my Z97 motherboard, the interface is the limiting factor and not the MyDigitalSSD SBX device. However, it's still quite a bit faster versus an SSD over a single SATA3/600 channel. Hopefully, this will set some expectations for those who are on older machines but not quite ready to pay through the nose for upgrading to a new motherboard, CPU and the insanely expensive DDR4 memory. (Context: I have 32GB of DDR3 memory and for me to purchase 32GB of DDR4 is more than a new CPU and motherboard itself).Mine stays at about 51C and running running Windows 10 Pro (April 2018 Update) and it's zippy fast. I was previously running dual Crucial MX300 256GB SSD's in an Intel RAID0 configuration and used PartedMagic to clone from my SSD Intel RAID0 directly to the new MyDigitalSSD SBX NVMe drive.Hope this helps!

I buy this one to replace an crucial SATA M500, and it's a good replacement. This drive is very good , quality /price.didn't get temperature above 65º Celcius doing tests...Had a litle problem to clone my windows 10 systems, because the free program EaseUS Todo Backup free didn't do the 4k alignment at the first clone pass. after playing with MBR / GPT booting recrod, i did it pass ....Realy great little drive for the money.Yet in some DBF reconstructions it is realy 10 to 20 porcent speedier than my old M500.the test i put in attached png where done , having files downloading from internet, so, there isn't at best...

The drive is relatively cheap and a good performer but, except for reads, as long as it remains empty, once you start filling it with data the performance drops dramatically, numbers are as you can see way lower that what advertised especifically for this drive (128 GB). Checking their website I can see a dramatic drop in writes, I wonder if there is a firmware upgrade I can use since I couldn't find anything for the Phison E8 controller. Windows 10 Pro is up to date, using latest drivers in every HW item.

Super fast. Love it. Installed Windows 10 in under 5 minutes from a USB3 stick. So good!