Maybe I missed it in the review, but how much does it cost?

@Darksword The Z340 series carries a slightly high price tag though, MSRP is 512GB/1TB $94.99 and $164.99, so that is 16 cents per GB for the 1TB model. https://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/teamgroup_cardea_zero_z340_m_2_nvme_review,2.html

Hilbert, do the Real World Benchmarks have any value? It seems to be 3 pages of charts that all say "yep, this is an SSD" when it could be covered by a sentence or two explaining that there is no perceptible difference between SSDs on application loading/performance.

Mojojoe:

Hilbert, do the Real World Benchmarks have any value?

To some yes, to others no. It paints a wide picture. Also, I do not fully agree, these are trace test workloads and some are multiple seconds faster. You can also flip it around as some would question the validity of synthetic benchmarks. In the end, it's about the entire complete picture so that you can make an informed decision.

Mojojoe:

Hilbert, do the Real World Benchmarks have any value? It seems to be 3 pages of charts that all say "yep, this is an SSD" when it could be covered by a sentence or two explaining that there is no perceptible difference between SSDs on application loading/performance.

On other review sites I've seen differences in loading times of different NVMe's / SSD's....I think it comes down to what you're choosing to load....if I remember rightly it was total elapsed time to load into a certain map of a game for instance...something along those lines....so there are differences, but I suppose you gotta choose the right ones. At the same time, it is useful to know that when loading some programs there are no differences.

I am currently running 2x SATA SSDs (2x 1TB Crucial MX500) in a Raid0 config using AMD Raid (the bios stuff), and I literally can't tell the difference to my Samsung 960 512GB NVMe drive. (swapped to the RAID solution for capacity, as a 2TB NVMe drive is still prohibitively expensive, and I had those drives anyway...) -- And it's not like I'm not doing heavy stuff... my PC is both my workstation and battlestation. I use it to earn a living and entertain myself too. After a certain level, any SSD will do fine for most people. I think that only very specialized workloads like 4K/6K video scrubbing can really stress the storage subsystem to the level where NVMe solutions are noticeably faster than SATA. For anything else, the differences are "academic".

Hilbert Hagedoorn:

You can also flip it around as some would question the validity of synthetic benchmarks.

wavetrex:

I think that only very specialized workloads like 4K/6K video scrubbing can really stress the storage subsystem to the level where NVMe solutions are noticeably faster than SATA. For anything else, the differences are "academic".

I think this is the crux of it. There currently are few realistic situations where the performance differences between various solid state storage options have a perceptible or even statistically significant measured impact. Personally that's what I'm interested in these reviews. What is different between product x and others? Are the differences manifest in a real world test? Great, that's more relevant to me as a user. However at the moment, for solid state storage, it's really only synthetic scenarios that can really explore those differences. Until there are some changes to the wider storage system architecture and new applications to exploit them, I expect it will stay this way. Edit: Does anyone have any insight into the heat generated by PCIe 4.0 kit? Is that something that will improve with new IC designs or is it something we will have to live with? Often the M2 slot is nicely placed by the GPU intake, which is not ideal.