Among the very fastest gen 4 pcie nvme ssds (wow, thats a mouthful!), only one or two are faster than this drive. Seems the top of the line samsung and western digital drives trade blows with this and it comes out favorable for the predator a lot of the time. Yet for some reason this just hasn't caught on, and therefore is coming at us at a pretty competitive price. It's made by a company called "biwin" or "binwin", something like that. They do a lot of rebranded 3rd party storage stuff, and have a good reputation. There are a lot of pro reviews, but they mostly have an issue of getting the drive for testing...and it coming with an extra large aluminum heat sink. That they all installed in place of the "graphene heat spreader", or the piece of black foam stuck on the top of the ssd. Heat is the big problem with these drives, with them reaching over 100c during heavy usage. When they go much over 60c, they start to 'throttle', or slow down to save themselves from immolation. We do not want that in our expensive high speed drive!! Lets get the 'graphene heat spreader' out of the way. I didn't use it, in fact as soon as I took this out of the mailbox and looked at it, I picked at it and it came right off intact without a problem. First off, one of the pro reviewers tested it for conductance (graphene is conductive, and expensive, and decent for removing heat), and it wasn't. So its most likely not graphene. Just some heat absorbing foam. Next the 2tb model that I bought has ssd memory chips on the BOTTOM as well as the top. While we want to keep the super fast controller chip on top cool, we really want to keep all of that memory cool as well. So my guess is that the included heat spreader, which almost certainly isn't graphene, isn't that great. Otherwise, why would they have decided to send it to pro reviewers with an aluminum replacement heat sink? Lacking much in the way of reviews for this without the foam spreader, I decided to get a Sabrent aluminum heat sink for around $20, and installed the predator drive into it, and then that whole thing slides in and screws down just like a bare drive. Tiny screws, be sure to have a good magnetic screwdriver to put it together. With that installed, running torture tests gave me a top temperature of 46 degrees, and all of the speed that this drive has to offer. Would it be okay with the foam spreader? Maybe. I'll leave that to other reviewers who installed it with that instead of going with a 3rd party cooler. Is this now almost room temperature even under load, not throttling, and not suffering an early death from heat? You bet. Recommendation for the Sabrent heat sink as well. It's pretty cool looking, and keeps the drive cool. Heat pipes and everything. I doubt that'll fit into a ps5, but I don't have one of those. It just went into my desktop computers' spare gen 4 m.2 slot. This is the heat sink they use on their Rocket line.
