EZDIY-FAB PCI Express M.2 SSD NGFF PCIe Card to PCIe 3.0 x4 M2 Adapter

Perfect

Specifically got it for the SSD heatsink and it works really well. It's aluminium with black paint, good quality. Used my own thermal grizzly thermal pads and it does the job great in my y720. Used the thermal pads that it comes with to increase heat transfer on the heat pipes and works really well too. They're not as flexible as the thermal grizzly ones, feel more silicon-like and thicker than expected, but really good hear transfer and dropped the temps by a cool 10-15 degrees Celsius.

I carefully read the specifications for this EZDIY adapter, and found the specifications vague and confusing. The bottom line is, if your OS supports the NVMe standard regardless if NVMe adapter integrated on motherboard or not, this device will work "most" of the time. I say most of the time because there are finite PCI lanes per CPU and chip set employed by the motherboard. Thus the vagueness of the specification. NGFF is a standard and form factor similar to NVMe but NOT compatible with older M.2 standards. How confusing is that? This device is keyed that same as NVMe and works with NVMe 22110 size for me when attached to a PCI X4 open slot.

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.

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.

I put in a Solidigm P44 pro and it does get full speed. The fit was a bit off and took some finagling to get it in the slot and screwed down. Don't know if its the card, motherboard, or case but something is slightly off. But I did get it screwed down.

I needed more spots for my SSDs and this worked perfectly - no complaints on my end and super easy to install!