SanDisk Extreme 1 TB NVMe Gen 4 SSD Review

#sponsored #freeproduct Easy installation, decent read/write, fast file transfers. Amazon Affiliate Product Link: https://geni.us/qW1E8I As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. #CommissionsEarned I installed this drive in the Acer Predator Helios Neo 16 as secondary storage. It has an M-key notch and slots into a 2280 form factor m.2 NVMe slot at a slight angle. Just press the end down and secure it with a screw. I also put a passive heat sink on the drive to help keep operating temperatures down, a simple aluminum plate with a double sided foam sticker on it. Just make sure the sticker has good contact with the chips on the drive. The drive will need to be initialized, partitioned and formatted using Disk Management before it will show up in Windows explorer. This mid-tier DRAM-less drive employs a single TLC NAND flash chip and advertises a max sequential read speed up to 5150 MB/s and write speed up to 4900 MB/s. During testing using CrystalDiskMark I found that the drive performed fairly close to those figures when transferring large files 64 GB files with a read speed of 5170 MB/S and 4820 MB/s write. Drive temperatures reached the 60-70s°C range, though it never crossed 80°C during sustained peak read or write. Not only does this drive perform well for gaming purposes, it also handles the demands of content creation just fine for editing and exporting large video files. As the drive lacks DRAM, it employs an SLC cache which can sustain peak write speeds up to a certain point, after which it will drop off to a reduced/throttled speed. While not advertised, this cache is likely large, to the tune of 50% of the capacity of the drive or more, so unless you're constantly writing large amounts of data, you’ll likely never encounter this limitation. For normal uses like gaming, streaming, and creative work, I found that it runs smoothly, and its rated lifespan is 600 Terrabytes Written. This Gen 4 drive is backwards compatible with older systems like Gen 3 and earlier PCIe slots, however, would only perform up to the limitations of those protocols in terms of read and write speeds. Overall, the SanDisk Extreme performs well for me as a storage drive and while it isn’t the fastest Gen 4 SSD out there, it is an affordable option for everyday computing tasks, casual gaming, and content creation, where the absolute fastest speeds are not essential As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases Amazon Affiliate Product Link: https://geni.us/qW1E8I