This is NOT the best M.2 SSD on the market. But what it is is high performance SSD priced very well with a ton of storage and priced well (at least when I purchased it). I needed additional storage for some of my games and videos I've been recording, and the 4 TB size was perfect to add years of storage longevity. Given I was going to be recording and editing videos, I wanted a high speed drive. Also, games are starting to use DirectStorage, and the discount to drop down to half the speed gen 3 drives is not enough to really consider unless I was looking at a 3rd drive for store and forget stuff. This was priced better than a lot of drives with similar specs, and after doing some research, the only red flag on this drive is a lower TBW rating than many similar drives (which sadly was not listed on the amazon page, I had to look it up on the actual product page). Knowing my use case, this was not a major risk for me. Of note, it's a InnoGrit IG5236 SSD Controller with a DRAM Cache. A well regarded controller and having a cache is good. Also of note, I'm aware this is slower than Gen 5 drives, but gen 5 drives are super expensive, and if you don't have a gen 5 slot, or are doing constant data transfers that will actually hit the speeds regularly, there's little performance gains once you get near the max of gen 4 speeds for most daily use cases. Pros: - Full Gen 4 PCIE Speeds - Up to 7000MB/s Read, Up to 6400MB/s Write, as advertised. It gets pretty close, which is among the top of Gen 4 PCIE drives. There are faster, but it's still twice as fast as Gen 3, and the faster drives are within 10% of these speeds, and mostly not noticeable for 95% of all users. -- Testing showed it was very close to these speeds, hitting around 6950 read and 6450 write in Crystalmark. On their website, they spec this drive at up to 6500 write speed. Those numbers are theoretical limits, so getting close is just fine. - DRam Cache - There are now solid ways around needing a DRam cache on some drives, but overall it's better to have than not to have. - Storage Value - It's worth questioning when a drive is more than 20% cheaper than similar competition. The good news is this drive is solid in every performance metric. There is a compromise, but your use case may not really matter for this. - Included heat sink - The included heat sink is great if you want to use this for a PS5, or on a motherboard without a heat spreader. It's also a nice subtle all black heat sink which goes with may different PC Aesthetics. Cons: - Low TBW - TBW, or Terabytes Written, is a rating for how long a drive is expected to last. 1400 TBW for the 4 TB mode is low. For comparison, similar 2 TB drives in the space have a 1400 TBW and 4 TB drives often have 2400 TBW or higher. Many slower drives are significantly higher, and that's generally a technical limitation (faster drives tend to be less durable). What does this mean? It means that the expected longevity for this drive is lower than some more expensive drives, or some slower drives. - Random Read/Write Speeds occasionally dip - Not sure why, but even in testing I would get occasional dips in random Read/Write speeds. Nothing major, and still great performance, it was was notable. For comparison, I have a similarly rated and well reviewed 2 TB Gen 4 SSD as my system drive. Overall, this drive tested slightly faster in everything but random reads by a very small margin (less than 5%). But overall, in daily use, I can rarely tell the difference. This drive also stays cooler, though to be fair, my main drive is mounted right by the GPU and CPU/VRMs, and we're talking 43-50C on the other drive under the MB heat spreader vs 40-44C on the Verbatum with it's own heatsink, so well within spec. So overall, for things like game storage, video storage and editing, and in general low write usage, this drive should last a long time. The only time I would really worry about the low TBW is if it was on a heavy use system drive where you do a lot of file system transfer. For reference, after 6 months of use, my main system drive has 14 TBW (so 1% of it's total rating) in about 5000 hours of use time, so honestly, unless you're a super heavy user, even the lower TBW rating of the Verbatum should be a non issue. For the price, I highly recommend this drive.