NVMe drives offer the perfect balance of size and performance. They attach directly to a slot on most modern desktop and laptop motherboards and leave no mess of cables for us to hide away in our builds.
PNY have just announced their latest range of M.2 2280 NVMe drives. Seen as an upgrade for users of SATA based SSD drives, the CS2130 range of drives provide an overall faster experience.
Coming in three capacities, 500GB, 1TB and 2TB. These drives offer up to six times the performance boost over older SATA SSD, thanks to the PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface.
But only the 2TB model offers the fastest sequential read speed of 3500MB/s and 3000MB/s sequential write. The 1TB model comes in at 3500MB/s sequential read and 1800MB/s sequential write. Which is no slouch for general desktop applications, but may hinder the performance of tasks requiring a large number of sequential writes. Sadly the 500GB model only offers up to 925MB/s sequential write speed, but still retains 3500MB/s sequential read. We were unable to determine if the drives use QLC or TLC as official information just lists it as "3D Flash Memory". An educated guess would be that these drives use QLC, given the consistent read speeds found across all of the drives.
There are many other alternatives for high performance NVMe SSD drives but if you want a simple drive to rejuvenate an old desktop or laptop, then this may be an option.
The drives start from $65 on Amazon for the 500GB model.