Review on EZDIY-FAB M.2 PCIe Adapter Card for PCIe 4.0 x4 Slots (Supports M.2 PCIe 22110, 2280, 2260, 2242 SSDs) by Cody Howard

Pros of the short version: It's well built, clean and attractive, fast and literally plug and play; Windows 10 does not require drivers. Includes short rod option and cheap screwdriver. The instructions are well written. Very fast; actually slightly faster than an identical NVMe SSD installed in the motherboard slot. This might be the best single slot 4X NVMe PCIe adapter you can find. Cons of the short version: The finish is excellent, they're visually appealing but don't fit well, and it's quite tight on the handlebars. Doesn't come with a thermal pad, but I wouldn't expect one with a $14 PCIe card. Incredibly bright blue/red power/activity LEDs that can annoy some people. Longer Version: Build Quality: Excellent. They are a bit tight as someone else pointed out. I didn't have to shave the metal off, but they are a little tighter than expected on the bar. However, I had to remove and replace the bottom card to get it to fit. YMMV. The M.2 slot supports SSDs from 42mm to 110mm, but almost all drives on the market these days are 80mm, so you should be fine. Toshiba is currently testing 42mm SSDs (RC100), which aren't as fast as say the Samsung 960 Evo or Pro, but are expected to be cheaper and this card should support them once it's available. Aesthetics: simple but good. It has a matte black finish with gold contacts and black slot covers. Goes great with a black or white theme. My system uses the EVGA X299 Dark so the aesthetic works perfectly. Each board has two LEDs: blue for power and red for activity. Works great if you have other LEDs in your system (depending on the theme) but they are very bright (brighter than Corsair LL120/LL140 fans or light bars) and can be visually undesirable for all builds. In the attached photo you can see them: two cards side by side. One has a pair of blue LEDs (top) indicating power (and possibly slot occupancy), while 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 in your build, you might not even see them. Another reviewer who compares them to police lights is not wrong. Accessories: Comes with a standard length panel, but also a shorter panel for smaller builds. Also comes with a chassis screw and a small cheap screwdriver. (Possibly unnecessary for most, but handy if you don't have anything laying around when it arrives.) No thermal pad included, but then again I wouldn't expect one at this price point either. They can be found cheaply at Revain, but I ended up with a few extras. Note that you may need thicker ones since the drive is mounted slightly higher than the board over racks. which is normal for the M.2 form factor. These are definitely 4X cards. Not sure what's causing the speed issues that others have had, but they're fast enough. (Perhaps others have seen bottlenecks when copying to/from another device?) These cards show up as 4X in BIOS and behave accordingly: CrystalDiskMark speed tests show them to be slightly (1-5%) faster than M.2 on my motherboard . hard drives. You are the real deal. Testing with Samsung 960 Pro 1TB M.2 SSDs I see the following results: Sequential Read (Q=32, T=1): 2954.588 MB/s, Sequential Write (Q=32, T=1): 2143.388 MB/s Random 4 KB Read (Q=8, T=8): 1715.290 MB/s [418772.0 IOPS] 4 KB Random Write (Q=8, T=8): 1521.472 MB/s [ 371453.1 IOPS] 4 KB Random Read (Q=32, T=1) : 544.766 MB/s [132999.5 IOPS] 4 KB Random Write (Q=32, T=1) : 489.859 MB/s [119594, 5 IOPS] 4 KB Random Read (Q=1, T=1) : 55.258 MB/s [13490.7 IOPS] 4 KB Random Write (Q=1, T=1): 203.347 MB/s [49645.3 IOPS ] Overall, this gets 5 stars. It's not perfect in every way, but it certainly surpasses everything I've come to expect from a sub-$15 PCIe NVMe m.2 adapter.