EZDIY-FAB PCI Express M.2 SSD NGFF PCIe Card 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/sSequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2143.388 MB/sRandom 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.

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.

Due to shady marketing, I fell for, I bought a motherboard advertising having five M2 slots turned out two of them share lanes with the PCI express X16 slot but most of the PCI express X1,2 and 4 weren't sharing lanes with anything. So I carefully slapped the third 2tb ssd into one of these and it gets the same speed as the others in the boards slots.

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.