Biostar launches a line of NVMe solid state drives for gamers on a budget

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These are Biostar's first NVMe SSDs, and they're reasonably priced.

Biostar is releasing its first NVMe solid state drive family and that could be good news for gamers on a budget. While not the fastest on the market, the company's new M500 series is generally cheaper than the competition.

  • M500 1TB: 1,700MB/s seq. read, 1,100MB/s seq. write
  • M500 512GB: 1,700MB/s seq. read, 1,100MB/s seq. write
  • M500 256GB: 1,600MB/s seq. read, 1,100MB/s seq. write
  • M500 128GB: 1,500MB/s seq. read, 550MB/s seq. write

To put those figures into perspective, Samsung's 960 Evo drives are rated to deliver up to 3,200MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 1,900MB/s of sequential write performance. Even Biostar's top-performing M500 SSDs don't come come close to those speeds, with the gap in read performance being especially high.

That said, they are still considerably faster than even the speediest SATA-based SSDs, save for write performance on the 128GB model. They're also attractively priced in the realm of NVMe drives. Here are the MSRPs:

  • M500 1TB: $269
  • M500 512GB: $149
  • M500 256GB: $99
  • M500 128GB: $59

That's about as cheap as it gets for a 1TB NVMe SSD, and compared to the 960 Evo (on sale for $422.65 on Amazon), it's far more affordable.

Biostar's M500 drives come protected in a diamond shaped heatsink to give the SSDs an "edgy gaming look" and efficient cooling to prevent throttling. They also feature data activity and temperature LED indicators.

"The LED Smart Temperature display delivers real-time temperature status of the solid state drive in three different levels: green for temperature below 50C, yellow for temperature between 50C to 65C, and red for temperature above 65C. The LED Data Transmission display data transmission status: blue light for access status and a green light for PCIe transmission mode (Gen 2 / Gen 3)," Biostar explains.

Biostar didn't say when these new drives will be available to purchase.

Paul Lilly
Paul Lilly

Paul has been playing PC games and raking his knuckles on computer hardware since the Commodore 64. He does not have any tattoos, but thinks it would be cool to get one that reads LOAD"*",8,1. In his off time, he rides motorcycles and wrestles alligators (only one of those is true).