Key takeaways

• PNY 1TB CS3150 M.2 storage drive, available fromAmazon for$158 .
• A fast M.2 drive that features active cooling to keep running temperatures below the maximum rated temperature.
  
• The heatsink makes the drive rather bulky, and you will also need a 4-pin fan header on the motherboard to power the fans.

Gone are the days of suggesting to someone with an aging and sluggish PC that they add more RAM or upgrade the processor. Now the usual speed bump is a new storage drive, and there's no better storage upgrade when it comes to performance than kitting a system out with an M.2 drive.

There are no shortage of excellent M.2 drives out there, but if you're looking for high-end performance and stability when the going gets tough, the new CS3150 by PNY is well worth a look.  

What makes this drive special? Not only does it have a heatsink, but that heatsink is kitted out withtwofans to dissipate the heat generated during use. 

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PNY CS3150 M.2 key specs

• Capacity: 1TB
• Form Factor: M.2 2280
• Interface: PCIe Gen5 x4
• Max Sequential Read Speed: 11,500 MB/s
• Max Sequential Write Speed: 8,500 MB/s
• Cooling: Dual-fan plus heatsink
• Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF): 1,600,000 Hours
• Warranty: 5-year limited warranty

How do you know if your system can take an M.2 drive? Check the manual for your system or the motherboard it uses, do an online search, or open it up and check for an M.2 drive slot. 

One of the biggest killers of storage drives is heat. While this isn't a problem for most systems, high-end gaming and content creation systems -- when pushed to their limits -- might hit a point where thermal throttling occurs (that is, a deliberate slowing down of the system to allow it to cool down) or -or the heat might cause crashes or premature damage to the drive.

The faster the drive, the more waste heat it generates.

And the CS3150 is a fast drive. Clocking sequential read and write speeds of 11,500 and 8,500 MB/s, respectively, it's not as fast -or as expensive -as the Crucial T705, but that drive doesn't have an actively cooled heatsink.

Testing the speed of the CS3150, I got speeds that were within five percent of the specs given by PNY, which is more than acceptable.

If you want to get the best out of this drive, note that you'll needat minimuman Intel Core 13th or 14th-gen or AMD Ryzen 7000 CPU on a compatible motherboard with a free Gen5 M.2 slot.

As for heat, I stress-tested the drive using CrystalDiskMark and monitored the temperatures using CrystalDiskInfo, and -- despite my relentless thrashing of the CS3150 -- I could not get the temperatures to exceed the 70