Warning: Long Review. Context and experience with SSDs
I recently purchased this device for my newest Alienware 17R4. Now at two months old and the EVO 960 PCI 1TB SSD, almost a month old, the games I had on the Crucial MX300 2TB SATA 2.5 Inch SSD- CT2050MX300SSD1 were moved to this new 960 EVO and there is a VERY noticeable increase in speed and performance over all compared to the previous Alienware 17 that I still own and installed a Samsung 850 EVO 1 TB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD (MZ-75E1T0B/AM . I have nothing but good things to say about the 850 as I had made it the boot drive/game drive on the previous system. I decided SSDs were the way to go for this new system. So I bought the Crucial 2TB SSD for the open SATA III port and it worked well enough, but some games were suffering severe lag, and I thought it may be the Crucial SSD, as it was a lot thinner and lighter than the Samsung 850 EVO 2.5inch SSD from the previous system. Turns out it was not the drive but the game itself which had been copied straight from the old system onto the new one, though the game had a severe outdoor lag that the game never had on the previous system. The old one has a 4thGen Core i7 2.80GHz overclocked to 3.2GHz, 16GB DDR3 RAM, 2GB Nvidia Geforce GTX 960m. But looking at the specs, the newer Crucial is just as fast as the SATA III 850 EVO, but cheaper, much lighter, smaller and twice the storage for less $$$ than the 850 EVO cost me (it needs a caddy to fit into the drive space available)..
In searching for a replacement drive, this system comes with a 2.5inch drive port (where the Crucial was installed) a boot drive slot for a PCI which currently has a crappy factory 128GB M.2 PCIe SSD which is small and slower by far, another such port where this 960 EVO is now installed, and there is still an open mSATA slot. I plan to replace the boot drive with another one of these same 960 EVOs which will bring my storage to 4TB, the largest I have ever had yet. With the mSATA I'm hoping it will be 5 or 6 TB later. I looked at the Samsung 850 EVO M.2 SATA III, but found it was the same speed as the first SSD on the previous system, though cheaper. It was still more expensive than the Crucial and only 1TB, so I looked into the 960 EVO/PROs, and was surprised how much faster the 960s were compared to the 850 EVO and Crucial SSDs (around 3X faster read/write speeds over both the 2.5inch SATA III and the M.2 SATA III). So I had the choice between the EVO and the PRO, and I saw that the PRO is several hundred dollars more expensive than the EVO for a mere 300MB/s of speed. The EVO is already 3x the speed of the Crucial, and the difference in performance was amazing. Moving 80GB of data used to take about a half hour on the SATA III 850 EVO and Crucial 2TB, now takes 10 minutes or less on the 960 EVO PCIe. This 960 EVO is actually less expensive than the 1TB 850 EVO SATA III I bought in 2015.
TL;DR Amazing speed. Perfect for gaming. Buy the 1TB 960 EVO PCIe instead of the 1TB 960 PRO PCIe. The 300 or so MB/s of speed of the PRO is not worth the $120-$150 increased cost. Very happy with the amazing look and performance of my games.
| RAM | 1 TB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Nvme |
