It may not look like much, but the Adlink S90 is a little revolutionary. It is a small drive that seeks to overturn the status quo. Conventional wisdom says that high-quality storage can only come from a few big companies. But Addlink has no respect for the old ways, and following the success of the S70 (which holds an important place in our Best NVMe SSDs guide), the S90 is raising the bar by offering the high-speed throughput of PCIe 4.0. This is not bad for a company seen primarily as a low-budget player.

If you have been following the transition to PCIe 4.0 for any amount of time, you will notice that every drive on the market today, including the Corsair Force MP600, Gigabyte Aorus SSD, and Seagate FireCuda 520, use the Phison E16 controller You'll notice that every drive on the market today uses the Phison E16 controller. And sure enough, below this sticker is the E16 controller, along with the equally ubiquitous Toshiba 3D TLC NAND flash memory. These are not all exactly the same, but they are close enough to be almost indistinguishable.

It is worth knowing at this point that to get the most out of this drive, you will need a Ryzen 3000 processor and the included X570 or B550 motherboard. Purchasing such a drive will help prepare you a bit for the future, but next-generation drives come at a premium, and you should consider this carefully. In particular, we all know that Samsung is developing a PCIe 4.0 drive.

Unlike its affordable predecessor, the Addlink S90 is only available in 1TB or 2TB; there are no 256GB or 512GB models, and it is designed to be paired with a powerful hard drive or SATA SSD. And while both drives are a bargain, the initial cost is high: $196 (£199) for the 1TB model and $399 (£398) for the 2TB drive. Still, that's only 20 cents per gigabyte, but that's a lot of gigabytes.

There is no doubt that this is a cheap SSD. This is evidenced by the packaging and the lack of anything else to make the deal more lucrative. There is no software, no utility to monitor the drive's performance, and no cooling system (although Addlink does offer another drive, the H90, which is essentially the same as the S90 but includes a heatsink).

NVMe SSDs are known to get hot, and any motherboard worth its salt will have some form of heat sink. The Gigabyte X579 Aorus Master we used for testing has heat sinks in every M.2 slot. Nevertheless, the peak temperature of the S90 during testing was as high as 69°C, reaching the limit of the recommended operating temperature of 70°C.

When it comes to performance, there is much to like about the Addlink S90, as there is with any PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. In synthetic benchmarks, even the best PCIe 3.0 SSDs are soundly beaten, with sequential reads nearly doubling. Write performance is also improved by about 1GB/second. Real-world performance falls short of these numbers, but the Addlink S90 still manages to shave a few seconds off. [However, the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 showed slightly better numbers almost across the board. However, the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 showed slightly better numbers almost across the board. There are a few more differences between these drives, though performance alone is not enough to recommend this drive.

The problem with Addlink is that it throws everything into the budget angle of the S90, and removing that leaves a drive that doesn't have much to offer. In short, it is a decent drive. Great performance, strong value for money, industry-standard components.

The problem is that the market reacted to its release and lowered the price accordingly. So you can now get a product like the Corsair MP600 Force for $200 (£190), with much the same performance but with a funky heatsink.

A bigger problem than Corsair and Gigabyte lowering the price of PCIe 4.0 drives comes from another budget operator, Sabrent, which also offers the Sabrent Rocket 1TB NVMe 4 SSD for $199, but you can often get it for much less comes with a cooler, has its own toolbox utility, and comes bundled with Acronis True Image. All the same price. This makes the Sabrent drive a fairly easy win.

This is great news for those actually buying the next generation of SSDs. Unfortunately, this will only last as long as there is real competition, and there is no telling how long it will last. Unless Addlink can address these price drops, it is hard to say that this drive should be purchased, because without the Addlink S90, there might not have been such an inexpensive next-generation drive. As it stands, the Addlink S90 feels like a kingmaker, not an actual king.