One SATA, One PCIe And One Box
The ADATA XPG ATOM 30 KIT is a handy upgrade kit for those in your life that continue to inflict their spinning rust upon you. For $125 you get an XPG 1TB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD and an ADATA 256GB 2.5″ SATA SSD which offers compatibility to older boards which have neve heard of PCIe 4.0 before. You could use the kit to upgrade a single system, or split the drives between two, depending on what makes the most sense for you.
The XPG ATOM 30 1TB SSD is a DRAM-less MLC 4x PCIe 3.0 NVMe 1.3 drive, which can actually make use of NVMe 1.4’s HMB protocol if supported on the system, and will offer around 2,500MB/s random reads and 2,000MB/s write. The 2.5″ ADATA SU670 Ultimate is slower, at 520MB/s reads and 450MB/s writes but is still significantly better than and HDD out on the market today.
Those speeds won’t come close to a high end PCIe 3.0 NVMe 1.4 drive, nor a low end PCIe 4.0 drive but for an inexpensive upgrade for an older system it certainly does the job. The FPS Review liked the idea, but would love to see a higher end pairing released as well, for those willing to pay a bit more for even better performance.