Samsung PM981 Polaris 1TB M.2 NGFF PCIe Gen3 x4, NVME Solid state drive SSD, OEM (2280) MZVLB1T0HALR-00000

I decided to swap out the SSHD for a pure SSD in my Dell laptop. I found out what model number Dell was using and that led me to this item. I updated my BIOS and slid this into the SSD slot and it was up and running within seconds. A quieter and faster laptop with a longer battery life is now mine for a very inexpensive price - given that this is about 950Gb of storage once it is formatted.

Worth the wait for a non prime item. Cloned a 5G M2 Polaris to this 1T M2 Polaris, Acronis, in 5 minutes. Just awesome speed and space for the money.

This is an OEM drive. It appears to be the next version of the 970 EVO, and is OEM supported (does not have Samsung support). It is an excellent drive and has the Phoenix controller, not Polaris. I used this part # because it is the 1 TB version of the 512 GB drive that came in my Lenovo Ideapad 720S – meaning the existing drivers would work. I backed up the 512 GB disk1 and restored to this 1TB drive (4 partitions - one was a FAT32/BIOS-UEFI partition). This turned out to be more difficult than I imagined, due to several factors: Windows 10, Acronis Disk Director 12, and a 4K Very High resolution 15" laptop screen. Outside of the Windows 10 environment, getting cues to display correctly on the very high resolution monitor was impossible. Also, getting the settings correct using Acronis True Image 2019 were challenging because the drive is formatted GPT, not MBR, and uses the Intel Rapid Storage Technology environment in RAID mode to support Optane. Once the initial load was complete, I had issues that made me suspect that Windows 10 was not configured correctly. Attempted to use Acronis Disk Director 12 to clear and reformat the drive (booting from a USB WinPE drive that included the partition software), but it was unable to change anything – couldn’t get to the boot agent to restart and apply changes. Found an AOMEI Partition Manager that could clear the drive without rebooting and was able to start over. But. The USB was running just the basic AOMEI Partition Manager and, not having a Windows display manager running caused the cue text to appear in a size 4 font, which was readable if you were very young or very nearsighted. Many pop-up windows could not be resized enough to see the text in them! I eventually cleared the drive, got it into GPT mode, and restored my 4th set of backup images. I would give this a 1 star but that would be totally unfair because the drive itself was not the problem.

Enough storage for programs and games on the NVME.

I have an ASUS ROG G703GX-PS91K gaming notebook and I was looking for a way to enable their "Hyperdrive Extreme" raid setup (it's basically what they are calling a 3 way raid 0 set up) The requirement is to use 1 samsung pm981 on the chipset lane and 2 intel 760p series SSDs on the 2, direct to cpu lanes. I originally made the expensive mistake of getting 3 sticks of 970 PROs and realized it won't work on this laptop. If you are looking to enable Hyperdrive Extreme on your G703, this OEM samsung ssd you are looking for. The performance seems to rival 970 PRO when running crystaldiskmark tests. With this SSD in my triple raid 0 setup, I've seen sequential reads show 9k+ MB/s depending on my cpu overclock settings (OC seems to affect read/write speeds). on a side note, a single 970 PRO also works for hyperdrive (but only 1 on the chipset lane). Hope this helps someone out there.

Easy to install.

Super fast SSD

So fast. So so fast! Negatives: would not boot (or even image correctly) on a Z97 board until I updated to newest (beta) bios. Then it booted fine Currently running it through a 4x PCIe adapter (qnine) and getting speeds shown.