CORSAIR FORCE Series MP500 480GB NVMe PCIe Gen3 x4 M.2 SSD Solid State Storage, Up to 3,000MB/s

Amazing technology. I've been building computers since DOS. Memory, CPUs, and busses all got faster, but the clunky, mechanical hard drives stayed pretty much the same. Now that's all changed. Plug one of these into your PCIe M.2 slot, and you'll like computers again. I was so impressed I upgraded motherboards, CPUs and RAM in two computers, and built a third, just so I could use this technology. Instead of 2-3 minutes to boot, it's now ~ 30 seconds from power on to desktop. My new motherboard even has a fast boot option that's so fast you don't even have time to enter bios. You'd have to clear CMOS to get in once you select fast boot. (I can live with 30 second boot times). If you already have a board with an empty PCIe M.2 slot, and your bios allows booting from PCIe, this is a no brainer upgrade. If your motherboard doesn't have an M.2 slot but will boot from PCIe, there are adapter boards for M.2 to PCIe. If your board doesn't have an M.2 slot, and won't boot to PCIe, it's time to change boards and whatever else you have to upgrade, just so you can use this. You won't be sorry. It's the most amazing upgrade in decades, IMHO. Check the size of your C drive now, and make sure you get one that's big enough.

With the launch of Kaby Lake, I decided it was finally time to upgrade from my old 2600k build to something shiny and new that could take advantage of the new NVMe m.2 drives as well as some newer technology that I was missing out on. My original idea was to use a Samsung EVO 960 250GB as a boot drive, but when I couldn't find one decently priced I decided to start researching literally every m.2 NVMe drive I could possibly find that came close to the EVO in price and performance. It actually proved to be a lot harder than expected since most m.2 drives were either SATA or only came in around 1500 MB/s at this price point. That was, until I stumbled across this drive.Relevant parts of my build:i7 7700kASUS ROG Strix GTX 108032 GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200MHz RAMCorsair MP500 240GBASUS ROG Maximus IX CodeWindows 10 HomeCurrent boot time is ~6 seconds and performance info is included in the attached image. The only negative I have currently found is that the drive itself does run a little on the warm side at roughly 67°C. This could be related to the armor on the Maximus IX Code restricting airflow a bit and it could just be the drive's normal operating temp. This is something I haven't actually tested out.

This M.2 drive made my computer wildly fast overnight. It already had a lot of horsepower under the hood so to speak but I never realized how much it was being held back by my traditional hard disks. I can count on one hand the number of seconds that pass from hitting the login screen to actively using applications on my desktop. I did have to move my Documents and Downloads folders to a secondary hard disk on account of this drive's relatively small size, but value for money this is one of the best shots in the arm you can give your computer to boost performance if your motherboard supports it.For reference, the rest of my computer is an i5-6600K CPU on an MSi Z170A Gaming M5 motherboard with two GTX 970 graphics cards. I also have a couple HDDs for storage and a regular SATA SSD for games. All in all everything inside except for this M.2 drive and the SATA SSD are at least a few years old and this upgrade has it running better than the day I put its current set of parts together.

My old system started getting memory errors so I decided to build a mid level gamer around a Kaby Lake i3 chip. This is my first NVMe M.2 drive and the results are pretty amazing. Would probably be better if I went up to a better CPU. However, the real world performance is hardly noticeable from my previous cheapo Kingston SSD drive. Sure the Crystal scores are 10x better, but I really don't notice it that much, if at all. That was even from my old 2500k system compared to this new one. The price was right so I'm not too upset about the purchase. I just may think twice about getting one of these types of drives in the future since the real world performance just isn't there. I installed this as my boot drive in my new system and Windows 10 installed with no issues. The system boots up in about 10 seconds, which is about 5 seconds faster than my previous system with the much slower drive. All new games run at mid to high level settings (1080p) smooth as silk.System specs:CPU: i3-7100Motherboard: MSI B250 PC MATEVideo: Zotac 1050 2GBMemory: HyperX FURY Black 16GB Kit (2x8GB) 2133MHz DDR4Boot Drive: Corsair Force MP500 Series M.2 SSD 240GB Internal Drive

I really love this drive. Computer boots up super fast in about 11 seconds from a cold start. The entire system is fully loaded when you get past the login screen. It is much smaller than you think it is. I stuck this in an Asrock Z270 Extreme 4, and it is pretty tiny where it is sitting at the bottom of the board. Whenever I point it out to people where the hard drive is on my motherboard, they are always surprised, almost as if they don't believe it. Super small, super fast. After installing Windows 10 on this, I had 84 GB left. The drive came in at 111 GB. I knew what I was getting. This drive has been a great staple to my new computer build. It has been fun to have such a fast and responsive computer. Thank you, Corsair.