Even several budget NVMe's like the Inland, Intel, and the HP all run at half speed or slower speeds. The current deals on the Samsung 970 Evo are
historical lows (look at the price chart) and the best value in NVMe drives. I bought the 500gb for 100 bucks. The only other ones that are kind of comparable value-wise that I have seen are the Adata 9000 series when they go on sale on Rakuten and with discounts, and I'm not really sure about the reliability of that brand.
Lots of people buy the cheaper HP's or the Intel 660s and don't realize
that they perform like this.
Yeah, speeds don't matter mostly. Maybe you shave 1-3s off your startup. But the point is to have a fast boot drive, put a couple of your favorite games on there, and decrease your loading time. By that line of thinking, you might as well just bought a regular SATA SSD. I would have been looking at the 1TB Crucial MX500s and 1TB Samsung EVO 860s for ~$120 if that was the case. Which is the other route to go. Everyone is waiting for them to hit sub $100.
The SSD I have right now and just installed was a 500gb EVO 860. That was a great deal at $83 two months ago and even that turned out to be a mistake. People are buying them now for $60-75 either on sale, or with the google express promotions.
Prices on flash memory are crashing, and likely going to continue to crash, so you only buy an SSD when you need one. Most of the time it doesn't make any sense to be buying larger capacity SSDs. They are going to continue to get cheaper according to industry analysts. Those guys were spot-on correct back in August.