XPG SX8200 Pro 2TB 3D NAND NVMe Gen3x4 PCIe M.2 2280 Solid State Drive R/W 3500/3000MB/s SSD

EDIT: updated from 1 stars to 4, while ADATA did not actively reach out to fix the issue from this review, their RMA process was fast and painless, replaced the drive no questions asked beyond the RMA questionnaire form with mostly personal info/ address plus brief description. Mailed new drive promptly arrived in 3 days. Hard to ask for more than that considering the purchase was 6 months ago. Waste of money! Died in less than 4 months from purchase, only 2 months being installed from light to moderate use in laptop . Turned laptop on today to find that the computer couldnt find either boot partition. Removed and installed the old tiny SSD I upgraded from, computer booted, put this piece of garbage in a external HD case, plugged it in, has power...computer cant find it...piece of garbage, save your money dont buy this!

The first one I got was DOA. Would not show up up all no matter how I mounted the drive. Amazon came to the rescue with a replacement that worked completely fine.

Excellent M.2 Work on iMac 2017 27”

Using a RIITOP passive adapter with no controller chip for the SX8200 Pro 1TB NVME drive, I could boot up my 2012 MacPro5,1, format the SX8200, and clone MACOS 10.14.6 Mojave to it. I put it in PCIe slot 2 but got only 750 read speed, despite that my system report shows the NVME connected to 4 lanes at 5.0 GT/s. People online mentioned that slots 3 and 4 share an onboard controller chip and would increase NVME speed there, so I moved it to slot 4. Read speed increased to 937, but still not quite the expected 1,500 which the PCIe 2.0 slot should provide. Maybe thats why the SX8200 was 30% cheaper than the 970 EVO... By the way, my SX8200 has the SM2262G chip, not the better SM2262EN chip.

Easy install and fast speeds, so far so good

I have bought three of these in the last month. The first one went into a high end desktop with a Gigabyte mother board. The speed increase from a SATA M.2 was just unbelievable. It went from 560MBs to 3300MBs. Then I made the mistake of trying to put one of these into my ASUS GL703GE-IS74 which seems to be only available at Costco. The specs say that it should work with this PCIE M.2 but the first one I couldnt get it to boot. The second one I finally got it to boot which is a pain because since there is only one M.2 slot I had to put in a spare 1TB hard drive then clone the SATA M.2 drive that came with it. If you look for this same laptop anywhere else but Costco it says it comes with a PCIE M.2. The strange part is that the SATA M.2 is faster in my laptop than this PCIE M.2 which makes absolutely no sense. With the Samsung Magician software the speed test for Sequential on the SATA M.2 was 8,395MBs the same test on this M.2 PCIE varied between 1,738MBs to 10,087MBs no where near the 33,000MBs so it is a total waste of money for this laptop. Im about ready to take the laptop back to Costco because of the huge discrepancy in what the M.2 performance should be. Why would the Costco version come with a SATA M.2? Im going to give this a 4 star because of how hard it is to clone if you dont have 2 M.2 slots. The Samsung software wont clone from a USB M.2 adapter. That would have made it simple.

The drive was fairly easy to install. I had two issues. The first was that there was no mounting screw. It seems petty, but a 2mm screw is not easy to find and you cant install the drive with out it (Ace hardware). The second is that it wasnt super clear how to get the software needed to clone the existing hard drive, but a bit of digging got it done. Unfortunately, there was no warning about disabling the old drive on reboot. My first clone attempt failed, but after reading a ton of comments on the internet, I recloned the drive and after the automatic shutdown, I unplugged the old drive before rebooting. The new drive booted fine after that. I plugged the old drive back in, rebooted, set the boot order in the bios and all was well. After I confirmed that the new drive was functioning well, I was able to reformate the old drive for extra storage and backup space. With the new drive in place, my system is significantly faster. Yes the drive is faster, but because the PC was constantly accessing it, even simple operations were slower than they should have been. The PC is now a joy to use. Slugs like PhotoShop are quick loading and responsive too. It seems that my PC had a fast processor with enough ram, but the old hard drive was the bottleneck.

Upgraded 2015 macbook pro at less than half the cost of apple authorised upgrade. Easy install but requires compatible adapter.

The drive is excellent. The downloadable software consists of an old version of the oem Acronis clone software and something called SKHSSD. The latter will not recognize the drive since it was not partitioned and formatted. The Acronis software insists that one log in or set up an Acronis account before using. The problem is that somewhere in the past I bought the home edition of the Acronis software. So when I tried to set up a new account I was told that I already had an account and when I went through the forgot password loop they sent my old serial number to me. That serial number didnt work with the new software. The story goes on but Ill jump to the end. The only way I could use the disk cloning software was to upgrade my old version of the Acronis software adding a cost of $40. The drive is an excellent product and is noticeably faster than the older 128Gb PCIe NVMe boot drive my computer came with. The terabyte is a great relief after a few years of worrying about filling up the boot drive.

For the recent sale price of a buck eighteen for 1TB, this is a fantastic value vs the Samsung EVO970 1TB storage. However, the Samsung EVO970 is better overall. For just a few bucks more regular price get the Samsung EVO970. Speed: Large sequential reads and writes are roughly on par. EVO970 + on reads. XPG + on writes. Small sequential reads and writes are roughly on par. XPG + on reads. EVO970 + on writes. Large random reads and writes the EVO970 blows the XPG out of the water. Not even close. Random reads and writes small are roughly on par. EVO970 + on reads. XPG + on writes. Overall, both are pretty darn fast, and it is unlikely you will see much difference in real world use. Reliability: Samsung has legendary reliability across all their SSD and NVME products. I have used about a dozen of them now and have never had one fail. They get replaced because you just need more storage space. XPG does not have such a great reputation in this respect. If you are provisioning your main computer drive (boot/Windows), paying a premium for Samsung is worth it in every case. XPG SX8200 is better suited for temporary/unimportant fast storage needs, such as games, media scratch, program scratch, etc. I would never use this drive for Windows or long-term bulk storage. Overall, for the price I paid, I am happy with this product. However, I would never trust it for boot/Windows or bulk storage. This is a game and scratch drive. If it dies, oh well. As long you as enter this purchase under that assumption, you should be fine. Update 12/04/2019: I am dropping my rating to 3 stars. There have been a couple...quirks. I copied over a collection of video and picture projects and one of the folders got bugged out. The pictures were there and previews would load, but all pictures reported as 0 bytes. Could not delete the folder, and the pictures were basically empty shells. I had to wipe and start again. Worked OK for a day, and then the entire partition disappeared on its own. If I had data on there, it would be lost. So, this drive has proven less than reliable after only a few days of usage. One more bug and this is going back.