SAMSUNG 990 PRO SSD 4TB PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal Solid State Hard Drive, Seq. Read Speeds Up to 7,450 MB/s for High End Computing, Gaming, and Heavy Duty Workstations, MZ-V9P4T0B/AM

I'm no fanboy but when it comes to storage, I love Samsung. It used to be Western Digital when I was young but something has happened to them over the years.This is one of their better drives. They do have newer ones targeting AI but unless you're decking out your machine for LLM and have hundreds of gigs of RAM to support it, this will suffice for basically everything except maybe the actual amount of space. So, buy a couple or look for an 8TB.These drives work well. I have a lower model in my desktop by mistake. Honestly though it's so fast compared to "faster" models from other brands, I can't tell I bought the wrong one.This one is in one of my laptops. The laptop mount wasn't correct so I had to make a rubber washer for UNDER the SSD which is unusual. Otherwise it mounted fine. Not the drive's fault but the computer.It was recognized perfectly but one note: If your computer has Intel RST/VMD and you intend to use linux, you may need to disable it. This may prevent Windows from booting until re-enabled. Luckily for me, I just deleted Windows. Problem solved. This is a side-note for those of you purchasing these for dual-boot to hopefully save you some headache.Anyway ... 4tb ... super fast .. I have it luks encrypted, full-bore. You simply cannot tell. That's why I love these drives. I work on sensitive projects. Some legal. Some health. Some security. Etc. I run full disk encryption on my project storage and active machines with different keys each obviously and other security measures we won't get into but with this sort of NVME the performance loss is absolutely negligible. For example the "AI" nvme is absolutely not needed in my case.I actually do a lot of AI code. Financial predictions to massive patterns that I can't explain here without breaching contract but the point is, the drives are never maxed out even while fully encrypted. My GPU, NPU or CPU always bottlenecks first.The same with Video Games. Even VR games.Basically, there are few cases where this drive will not suffice. You'll know if you truly need better. If you aren't sure then, this drive will probably be perfect but it doesn't hurt to double-check.

My PC is about 5 years old now. I purchased an Alien Hardware Aurora r10 at the beginning of the pandemic 2020. It's been running great until recently when I ran out of storage. I went through the tedious task of deleting programs/games I wanted to keep but wasn't using at the moment. In order to download what I wanted to play right now. Us gamers all know that pain, lol. I added an external hard drive but quickly noticed that some of the more complex and demanding games do not play well when downloaded on an external hard drive and just connected with a USB. It makes for buggy and choppy gameplay with constant crashes.I finally decided it was time for an internal hard drive upgrade. This is my first PC and I had no idea what to do. I advise anyone who is PC illiterate like me to make your best friend ChatGPT. It completely helped me through this whole process as far as identifying what product would fit in my PC case and what product was compatible with my PC. It gave me options for different SSDs depending on what I wanted and what I needed. It even walked me through the installation process.All I really needed was more space for my games as well as pictures and videos that I like to save. But I was not expecting the other improvements. I quickly noticed that my PC began to start up with lightning speed. Programs that once took quite a while to boot up now took less than a second or two to start!But the thing that I am most excited about are the download speeds. I have great internet but even so my download speeds have always been slow 20 to 50 Mbps. It would take hours and hours to download things.After installation of this new SSD, download speeds shot up to 700–800+ Mbps!!! I downloaded the new COD BO6 which is over 150 GB in just about 14 minutes. A download like that before the upgrade would have took three to four hours or more! As I've done some reading since, just an SSD upgrade shouldn't have caused such a massive increase in Mbps. My guess is that since I did to a fresh Windows install on the new SSD, that could have cleared up driver issues, background processes, or software that was slowing down my network. That paired with better NVMe performance could be a factor. Either way I'm extremely happy about this upgrade. I would have been happy with just the 2TB of extra space. Next I'll be buying one of these for my sons PS5. A+++

Installed the Samsung 990 Pro 4tb into my sons HP Omen 40L Intel i7 about a month ago. The unit originally came with the Western Digital SN530 1tb SSD which was good but had filled up quickly, would become "laggy", and would sometimes even crash while playing bigger games like COD and GTA. So far so good with the Samsung and with 4 terabyte's there is plenty of storage for him without maxing space out. I added the (be quiet! MC1 M.2 SSD Cooler Heatsink for Single and Double Sided 2280 modules) aftermarket heatsink off Amazon to keep it running cool and efficient. I was able to grab the Samsung SSD on sale for under $200 so thus far it has been well worth the money. I'll try to remember to give a 6mos up-date as well. So far I'd say don't hesitate to upgrade with this beast!

So far, so good. Haven't done extensive testing. HOWEVER: My two cents. I have no idea why people put their OS on these things. I rely on cloning to have an instant backup in case of any corruption of the OS so I don't have to do full reinstalls, and I rely on cloning to have off-site storage of my boot drive with data on it. You can't clone these M.2 NVME drives and have a bootable backup. Not possible. Further, these things are GREAT for large file transfers such as gaming and video installs, but for an OS? My SSD is just as fast to boot up as these things are, and I can clone an SSD for an instant backup in case of OS corruption. Why do people talk about these for OS's?