TEAMGROUP MP33 256GB SLC Cache 3D NAND TLC NVMe 1.3 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 Internal SSD R/W Speed up to 1600/1000 MB/s Laptop&PC Desktop TM8FP6256G0C101

Bang for buck king of 4TB m.2 SSD's in late 2023 when I got it. Went for around $165. The price has creeped up since then but its still a solid bargain here in early 2024.Uses the Realtek RTS5762 controller (low cost but decent performance) with Hynix TLC flash (decent price, performance, and durability for a consumer drive at .5 DWPD) and has 128MB of DRAM to act as a buffer. Some of the TLC flash is ran in a pseudo "SLC cache" mode to improve performance which is how this thing performs so well despite using lower cost components.That performance will drop pretty hard if you get the drive near full because of that. So don't try to fill up more than 75% of the way if you want high performance. At 4TB though that still leaves plenty of space so IMO its not a big deal.It will still certainly beat the heck out of a lot of the QLC trash drives that are usually what sell for this price in this capacity range even when near full though.The supported PCIe gen is "only" 3.0 but that is still --perfectly-- fine, really quite good IMO, for almost anything you would need out of a consumer SSD in 2023/2024 and probably 2025 or 2026 at least as well.The generation of PCIe only effects max data transfer rates (that is linear reads/writes) which hardly matters at all for most desktop use cases once you get to PCIe 3.0 speeds. ===Its low queue depth random read/write performance that matters for desktops.=== Yes even in gaming. And this SSD does pretty well there thanks to its caching scheme despite the cheaper controller.To get significantly better performance than this drive you would have to step up to buying a Optane SSD (getting harder to find in late 2023 and still fairly expensive if you want more than 2TB, probably will need u.2 adapter as well.......) or a MUUUCH higher cost enterprise class SSD like a Kioxia CD8P or CM7, or the Solidigm P5810, or a Memblaze PBlaze7 7940 drives. Which are also not m.2 and did I mention how terribly expensive they are??Note that this MIIIIIGHT change if Microsoft's Direct Storage ever really takes off among software developers. Right now that easily seems years away at best though. I think only 1-2 games support it as of early 2024. At least 1 of which sucks fairly badly (Forspoken) and the other has some serious bugs that making playing irritating. And this drive will still benefit a whole lot from software that properly uses Direct Storage anyways so you don't have to worry about it for a long long time.

Used this in my new PC, it's running my OS. I use my PC for heavy gaming and other miscellaneous computer things. The quality is great I've been using it for over a year! It fit perfectly in my build, it was easy to install and the performance is just great! I have no issues with it and my PC runs and boots up super fast! I would order this again for any future builds and even recommend it to friends!

(For people that install the drive and freak out because they don't see it in files explorer, there will a tutorial for you down below)(Your new SSD doesn't have a file system, so Windows really doesn't know how to communicate with it. So we have to initialize the drive, we are gonna assign a file system that Windows can understand. To do this, it's really simple. Just go ahead and right-click on the Windows icon and go up to Disk Management. This will pop up the Disk Management Utility, and if you just installed a drive like i did, you'll see this little window here that says Initialize. In here, we can go ahead and select our partition style. We're going to want to use GPT. This is going to be pretty much for any modern computer or a modern drive, and click OK. And just by doing that, there's now a partitioning system that Windows can use to actually communicate with the device, but it still doesn't show up here. Well, that's because we haven't formatted the drive or assigned it a drive letter. So to do that, it's pretty simple. All we got to do is right click in this unallocated space area, click new simple volume, and this will pop up the new simple volume wizard. Here we can click next. Next again, this will do the full size of the drive automatically. And then we're going to assign it the letter D. Click next. And then we can name it whatever we want and click next one more time and click finish. This will go ahead and format the drive. And if we now check in File Explorer, we'll now see that our data drive shows two terabytes (or whatever size you bought) of free space).Great reliable, fast and cheap drive.

Item came as described, was a easy setup and ran testing on it and shockingly it outperformed my primary hard drive by 211% lol. It is compatible with older models as I am still using my HP Elitebook 850 g3 and no issues. The speed is great for a affordable drive.

For what the 512 GB, 1/2 TB, 3.0x4 is designed, to be inexpensive and to work right for a regular multipurpose PC, these "little sticks of gum" are doing their job. I put these into 2 of my PCs that I am giving away, both of which are otherwise very powerful. Purpose being to remove all my data. In each, they seamlessly functioned as clean. And easy installation of windows. Something about a 4 TB 5.0x4 makes installation difficult, and those are for hot setups. So later on when the ladies I gifted these PCs to want to increase or "raid" them, they can do so easily, and won't need to install windows into their bigger faster SSDs.I know, the 3.0x4 go fast for awhile, then slow down a little, then fast again. That's not an instability. It's what 3.0s do. So, these do well and as expected. They were inexpensive, take windows easily. I like.