Working perfectly several months later (just DO NOT update the firmware).
I have it installed in a Linux system where it serves the dual role of root partition as well as VM backing storage for several heavily used VMs.
It's so fast there's no way to tell that the drive is being shared, no VM pauses, no compiler slowdowns. The downside of all that speed, if you want to consider it a downside, is that I managed to eat through 1% of the drives rated lifetime (4TB of 400TBW) within 24 hours before stopping the poorly written process that was causing all the write traffic. Samsung drives are known for surviving well beyond their rated life, but that's also where the warranty ends, regardless of how long you've owned the drive, so be careful.
The drive gets so hot it requires a heatsink, it's really not optional. Sure, it'll throttle itself to avoid overheating, but so would the main CPU if you left it in open air. Anything that makes this much heat needs a way to get rid of it, and SSDs tend to have shorter lives or die unexpectedly when the heat isn't properly handled.
I bought some small pure copper heatsinks from Enzotech here (BMR-C1) and lined them up all the way down the entire stick, covering every chip, then I put a small fan inside the case positioned so that the airflow goes through the heatsink bars. It no longer throttles itself under load, and S.M.A.R.T. shows the temperature remaining well below the previous high points I was seeing, even when writing at the maximum speed.
Note that there is a firmware update available that you absolutely do not want, the 3B6QCXP7 firmware has very serious problems and cannot be removed or reverted once the update is done. If you get a new stick with the 3B6QCXP7 firmware, you should return it immediately or contact Samsung customer support.
| Hard Drive | 512 GB Nvme |
|---|
