Review on 💻 Rivo PCI-E Riser PCIe M.2 PCIe SSD Adapter Card - High-Speed NVMe/AHCI Support & Wide Compatibility - 2018 Edition by Robert Demissie

At first I couldn't find a suitable mounting screw for this Rivo PCI-E Riser PCIe M.2 PCIe SSD to PCIe Express 3.0 x 4 Adapter Card, 2018 Edition. It seemed unacceptably short. But I finally got it: This is a three-part fastening system (black screw, brass nut, and brass bushing), not two parts (brass screw, brass nut). The parts are so tiny I couldn't see that what I thought was a brass screw was actually a brass socket for the black screw. I thought the black bolt was some kind of spare tire. I'm still not sure if I did it right, but I:- put the brass sleeve on the table,- put the card on top (with my Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB SSD (MZ-V7S1T0B/AM) already in the slot ) ,- pressed the M.2 down - inserted the brass nut into the mounting hole on the M.2 - used a 000 screwdriver to drive the black screw through the brass nut into the brass socket. I'm concerned about the angle of the M .2. Perhaps the brass nut should be the spacer between the M.2 and the card. I'll try to find out. However, the manufacturer includes some sort of guide on how to use this mounting system. [EDIT 1] After examining the seller's photo on the store page showing an installed M.2 device, I decided to pursue what I could make out of what. Starting at the top (on the side with the M.2 drive) I have a brass bushing over the M.2 hole, a brass nut just below the M.2 drive (which acts as a spacer separating the M.2 from the M. 2 drive holds on top of the adapter board), and a black screw protrudes from the bottom through the board, brass nut, M.2 mounting hole and into the brass bushing. A bit tricky to manipulate, but I prefer the position of the M.2 on the map. [/ EDIT 1] At least as long as the card works acceptably. I've attached a CrystalDiskMark screenshot showing the performance of my 970 EVO Plus on a card with a PCIe 3.0x16 slot (unfortunately shared with my graphics card), the same card in a PCIe 2.0x16 slot, and my old Sandisk SSD (left ) points to the right). If you compare this to some CrystalDiskMark screenshots on the 970 EVO Plus store page, you can see that the serial data is comparable, but the random data is much lower: Seq Q32T1: 3329.8/3015.7 vs. about the same 4KiB Q8T8: 694.1 / 592.5 compared to about twice 4KiB Q32T1: 197.5 / 145.3 compared to about twice 4KiB Q1T1: 38.91 / 87.50 compared to about twice I don't know asking if the problem is related to that riser or if the card is in a PCIe slot shared with my graphics card (so running x8 instead of x16). Note that random speeds are about the same in a PCIe 2.0x16 slot, while sequential speeds are halved. But the adapter allows me to use my M.2 at pretty good speeds until I can replace my motherboard with something that supports M.2 drives natively. So I rate it 3 out of 5 stars as OK. EDIT 2: I've now moved my M.2 drive to be natively supported by the new motherboard (i.e. I no longer use that riser). After testing the drive the same way as here, its performance rose to the level shown on the drive storage page. I still don't know if the slow performance in the riser is an issue with the riser itself or if I had to run it in a shared PCIe slot. So I'll leave my rating for the boner the same.