EZDIY-FAB PCI Express M.2 SSD NGFF to PCIe 4.0 x4 M2 Adapter (Support M.2 PCIe 22110, 2280, 2260, 2242)

Short version pros: These are well-built, clean and attractive, fast, and literally plug-and-play; no drivers needed under Windows 10. Includes a short slat option and a cheap screwdriver. Instructions are well-written. Very speedy; actually slightly faster than an identical NVMe SSD mounted in a motherboard slot. These may be the best deal on a single-slot 4X NVMe PCIe adapter you can find. Short version cons: Build quality is great and they're visually attractive but the fit is off and it's pretty tight at the slat. Doesn't come with a thermal pad, but I wouldn't expect one with a $14 PCIe card. Ridiculously bright blue/red power/activity LEDs that may annoy some people. Longer version: Build quality: Excellent. They are a bit of a tight fit, as someone else has pointed out. I didn't have to shave any metal, but they are a bit tighter than expected on the slat. I did have to remove and replace a lower card to get it to fit, though. YMMV. The M.2 slot supports 42mm-110mm SSDs, but almost every drive on the market right now is 80mm so you'll be fine. Toshiba is currently testing 42mm SSDs (the RC100) that won't be as fast as, say, the Samsung 960 Evo or Pro, but they are expected to be cheaper and this card should support them whenever they become available. Aesthetics: Simple, but nice. It has a matte black finish with gold contacts and black slot panels. Goes great with a black or white theme. My system uses an EVGA X299 Dark so the aesthetic works perfectly. The cards host two LEDs each: blue for power and red for activity. Works great if you've got other LEDs in your system (depending on the theme), but they are extremely bright (brighter than Corsair LL120/LL140 fans or the light strips) and may not be visually desirable for all builds. You can see them in the attached photo: two cards are next to each other. One has a pair of blue LEDs (top) indicating power (and possibly that the slot is populated), and the other has both blue and red LEDs indicating both power and activity. There are no LEDs on the outside of the panel; they're strictly internal. If you don't have a window on your build you may not even see them. The other reviewer that compares them to police lights isn't wrong. Accessories: comes attached to a standard-length panel but also comes with a shorter panel for smaller builds. Also comes with a chassis screw and a small, cheap screwdriver. (Probably unnecessary for most but handy if you have nothing lying around when it arrives.) No thermal pad included, but again, I wouldn't expect one at this price. They can be found on Amazon cheap, but I happened to have a couple of extras. Note that you may need thicker ones as the drive is mounted somewhat above the PCB via standoffs. which is normal for the M.2 form factor. These are definitely 4X cards. I'm not sure about the cause of speed issues others had, but these are plenty fast. (Perhaps others saw bottlenecks when copying to/from another device?) These cards show up in the BIOS as 4X and act like it: CrystalDiskMark speed tests place them at slightly (1-5%) faster than my motherboard-based M.2 drives. They're the real deal. Testing with Samsung 960 Pro 1TB M.2 SSDs, I'm seeing the following results: Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2954.588 MB/s Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2143.388 MB/s Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 1715.290 MB/s [ 418772.0 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 1521.472 MB/s [ 371453.1 IOPS] Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 544.766 MB/s [ 132999.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 489.859 MB/s [ 119594.5 IOPS] Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 55.258 MB/s [ 13490.7 IOPS] Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 203.347 MB/s [ 49645.3 IOPS] All in all, this gets 5 stars. It's not perfect in every way, but it definitely exceeds what I'd have expected from a sub-$15 PCIe NVMe m.2 adapter.

Has tall and short brackets, and comes with standoff-screw (even a mini screwdriver if you don't already have one). I tried this with a PNY XLR8 and Samsung 980 NVMe SSDs (both M.2 2280). At first I ran a benchmark in Windows 10 and the speed was much lower than expected (around 900MB/s), so I installed HWiNFO64 to check the PCIe speed and lanes... turns out my motherboard (ASUS ROG Maximus) sets the default lanes for the x4 slot to only x2 lanes (shared with additional on-board SATA, which I wasn't using) so I had to change that to x4 in the BIOS setup in order to get all 4 lanes. Afterwards the drives performed way faster (over 3000MB/s). Another side note: I also tried the card in a free x8 slot, but putting anything in there decreases the main GPU x16 slot to x8 - so I avoided that option. I think newer motherboards/CPUs have more PCIe lanes in general, but it's still worth checking the motherboard manual before installing. On Linux, one can use `lspci -vvv` to see current speed & lanes. Another caveat of this review - my PC only supports PCIe 3.0, so couldn't verify that this adapter runs fine at PCIe 4.0 speeds.

Update: 1-12-2019 I Upgraded my desktop computer from my ancient windows Vista/upgraded to Windows 7 machine to a new Dell XPS 8920. I installed a Corsair MP510 480 GB SSD https://www.amazon.com/CORSAIR-FORCE-MP510-480GB-Storage/dp/B07HR83J4S/ref=cm_cr_srp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8 on this adapter card and dropped it into place in the tool less chassis of the EPS. 5 minute installation time. I turned the machine on and formatted the drive and Ta Da! A new drive F: Very nice fit, finish and function. Just extremely cool. Cant be any easier. I installed this in my old desktop computer to upgrade it to a solid state drive. The drive snapped into place on this board easily and the card fit perfectly in my motherboard. You can't do any better than that. Unfortunately I did not pay attention to the description. My computer is running windows 7 O.S. Duh....it clearly states this card does not work with windows 7. Yup, my boo boo. Still, it is a nice product. :)

Electronically, the card seems to work great. But it was over 3/16 bigger than could fit in my computer, to get it to fit I had to replace the metal backer with a similar piece from a 33.6k modem from storage. I feel like it adds 4 seconds to the bios boot time, but have not extensively tested whether that is true. Probably an illusion of just paying more attention to the boot process than I normally do.

This is a great card, well made, and worked flawlessly in my application. I have a FreeNas server, using an ASUS P10S-I server motherboard. I was using all of the SATA ports for storage and was using a USB stick for the operating system because the on-motherboard M.2 slot would disable one of the SATA ports which I needed for storage. I had numerous issues with the Samsung USB sticks I was using for booting the OS; they were becoming degraded over time and stopped working. Even mirroring two sticks didn't work, one of them, or both of them would eventually be corrupted. Some issue with either the flash drives, or using the USB slots. As I didn't want to keep using the USB slots, or USB drives to boot the OS, I bought this adapter card for the unused PCI slot on the motherboard. A Corsair M.2 120GB NVMe drive was installed in the add-on card, plugged into the motherboard, which recognized it immediately. Reinstalled FreeNas onto the NVMe drive, imported my backup configuration file and disk decryption string and bang, works like a charm.

I own an 5 year-old Dell Desktop XPS 8900, 1TB HD, 16GB RAM, Windows 10, and bought a 256GB NVMe 2280 M.2 SSD card (also from Amazon) to speed up the boot up process. Even though the motherboard is listed to have "One M.2 SSD with RAID 0 Stripe/1 Mirror", I could not figure out how to migrate the drive to Device Manager. Instead of investing any more time in research, I purchased this (relatively inexpensive) PCIe to NVMe adapter card. Installation itself was fairly simple: Plug the SSD into the card and tighten the mounting screw. The hardest part was inserting the card into the PCIe slot - very tight fit, but it finally went in. If you power up the system and see a very bright blue LED emanating from the board, you are connected. The manufacturer included easy to read physical installation instructions inside the package, but unfortunately their guidelines stopped here. There is no mention to having your operating system recognize the new drive. After a few hours searching and reviewing YouTube instructional videos, I finally discovered that I needed to go into the Windows Disk Management system, select the drive to recognize, format it and I was done. They could have saved me time by adding just one or two more lines on the installation instructions. After a reboot and the SSD drive appearing in File Explorer, I downloaded and installed the Macrium Reflect (free version) program. It seemed to have very good reviews by experts. Again using YouTube for helpful tips, I cloned the operating system to the SSD, rebooted and DONE! I wa surprised and delighted to see that BIOS automatically updated to show the SSD as the boot-up C: drive. Nice! Finally something that worked the first time. I tested the drive speeds using (free-version) CrystalDiskMark. In the end, all this work was well worth the time spent; the new SSD read-time is 9-10X faster (pic 1) than the Toshiba HD running at 7200 rpm (pic 2). The system booted up in under 20 seconds, and after signing in Windows Desktop opened in only 2 seconds. Office and other programs also open up much faster. For less than $85 total investment, my desktop is now super-fast. I am a believer in the real speed advantage of SSD vs. Hard Drive.

I had originally purchased a Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 card (dual NVMe PCIe adapter) to install my two Samsung NVMe drives only to find it would not work with my EVGA X299 Dark motherboard. It was not detected at all. I returned that and purchased two of these and I am pleased to report that they work flawlessly. Considering the super-affordable price, I cannot really complain about anything. Very happy with the product and price. The only con is that I had to use two PCIe slots instead of one. The LEDs are bright, but I don't care about that. I suppose if it were bothering me I would just cover them up with something like a small square of electrical tape, or subdue the brightness with a coating of black ink from a marker or tiny drop of paint from a paint pen.

The card looks nice and works but I have to remove the bracket to get it to line up with the PCIe slot. All other cards I have fit fine but this one is like a 1/32” too long and can’t line it up with the bracket attached. Even if I loosen it, it still would not fit, I had to take the bracket off. I shouldn’t be shoving a delicate SSD card into my PC.