If you’re ready for a storage upgrade and want to take advantage of those PCIe lanes on your motherboard, you can snag an Adata 256GB M.2 NVMe solid state drive (XPG SX8000) for $115 from Newegg.
It’s actually sold and shipped by Adata, which is selling the drive on sale through Newegg as a third-party reseller. There’s no promo code to enter or mail-in-rebate to fuss with, just a $15 discount over the drive’s regular list price.
One thing to pay attention to when shopping for an M.2 SSD is the interface. Some M.2 form factor SSDs shuttle data through the SATA bus, with speeds topping out the same as a 2.5-inch SSD. Others, the one that is one sale here, are NVMe drivers that push data through the PCIe bus.
There’s not much difference in gaming performance between the two, though if you do a lot of heavy file lifting, the faster speed of an NVMe SSD can be helpful. In this case, the 256GB SSD is rated to deliver up to 1,900MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 1,100MB/s of sequential write performance. Not the fastest speeds among NVMe drives, but still a significant bump over SATA-based SSDs.
You can grab this drive on sale here.