Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsGood Golly Miss Molly, this thing is FAST. Not an EVO, but is a SAMSUNG, Time will tell if it lasts.
Reviewed in the United States on May 21, 2020
Easy to get into my laptop, went with the PM981 because the $15 price difference was important, I could have gone with a lesser brand, but this was my first NVMe SSD, and I had seen a lot of reviews of non-Samsung drives where the consensus was, that they should have gone with a Samsung. Also, if I had bought my laptop (Lenovo Ideapad L340 17API) with an M.2 SSD instead of a HDD this is what they would have put in it, so it was the easiest way to keep it as close to factory as possible, not that that was a major consideration, but it can't hurt if I have issues down the road. Lenovo doesn't seem to have a clue as to what is in my system, maybe they will cover it under warranty!
Anyway: As stated, it went in easy. I cloned my 1TB HDD to the 512 GB Samsung NVMe SSD with Macrium Reflect 7 Home, which worked without a hitch. And that is good, since any disk cloning -- disk management software can be finicky. Keep that in mind; you may have to try a few different ones till you find one that works for you. Luckily, you can get several options in the software for free or free trial. Hopefully, you are like me, and read these before you purchase. As I said above, and some of the other reviews have noted the cloning and disk Management can be a bit tricky. Unless you like to take the chance of losing your data, back your stuff up, do your research and figure out what you need to do and have handy to do this. If you don't know what you are doing, are not willing to learn, or your system is mission critical, then get someone else to do it for you. You have been warned.
Bottom line here: I can't tell you how it will last, It has only been in my system for a few days. I haven't had a chance to bench test it for speed and such yet, but the seat of the pants test is this thing is blazing fast. Temperature shows on my drive monitor as 84 degrees Fahrenheit during normal use. My Lenovo with a Ryzen 5 3500U and 8 GB RAM used to take almost 5 minutes from full shutdown to re-boot and be fully ready for business. It would take a minute and 30 seconds or so just to get to the initial log in screen. About 12 seconds now. Once you put in the password, you are able to start using the PC with all desktop and taskbar icons loaded in just a bit over 30 seconds, and sometimes less. I'm blown away. This is awesome performance. Update: I have now run Crystal Disk Tests on this, and it's about as expected, and matches the claims made. However, the real test is daily use, and that's where this type of drive makes a difference. I never would have thought that the boot and programs drive COULD have this much impact on the performance of my laptop. I always thought the main performance was in the CPU and RAM, and that a drive might slow you down but couldn't really speed you up. This might have been true in the past, but if so, it's not true anymore. My laptop was bought new in 2019, and I thought of it as a bit doggy, but not too bad for a $400 PC. I really thought it was just a cheap computer with only 8 GB of RAM, and a low end AMD Ryzen 5 (Mobile) running Windoze 10. My wife's laptop is several years old, but has specs pretty much the same, with about the same performance. I just thought that PC's weren't advancing like they used to. Now I think they have been advancing, but Hard Drive performance has not; until now. HDD aren't dead, but they should be there for cheap, mass storage where speed is not needed. SSDs are the only thing to have in a PC now, and you definitely want a NVMe PCIe M.2 drive for your boot drive, and for loading and running programs and games if your system can run one. If you can't use an NVMe M.2, then at least get a SATA III SSD. If you still want a lot of storage for your system, then a HDD is fine, and cheaper, but if you don't have time to waste, then upgrade. At my age I have better things to do than watching spinning circles, hourglasses, and loading bars.
My drive temperature monitor shows it runs 85 to 90 Degrees F. most of the time under normal use. I just copied 80 GB from the Samsung PM981 to my new SK Hynix 500 GB storage drive. (Yes, I got rid of the HDD entirely. Note: All temps are in Fahrenheit), and the temp went up to 120 to 125, and the speed dropped down to about 170 to 250 MB/Sec, it took a few minutes, and the temps dropped down to normal in less than 5 minutes. I did mount a heat-sink on the PM981 prior to install, so I don't know if it helps, hurts, or makes no difference. I have read articles that indicate that a heat sink and thermal silica transfer pad between the label and the heatsink is a good idea, especially if you do a lot of large data transferring that would heat it up. Mine does get hot quickly during large transfers, up to about 120 to 135 Fahrenheit, but I've never seen it higher than that. But I've never done more than about a 4 minute data transfer.
My main concern is not how fast it copies huge chunks of data, but how responsive and quick it makes my computer perform. For the speed and responsiveness it provides, I am blown away. Get one, you won't be sorry!
