BIOSTAR Unveils M500 M.2 2280 Two Lane PCI-Express NVMe SSD

This is not bad product. But it has inherent flaws of all PCIe 3.0 x2 M.2 SSDs.

On AM4 platform, there are usually two M.2 slots. One is 2.0 x4, with which all those x2 devices run as 2.0 x2. Therefore user does not get most of them.
Other slot is 3.0 x4, in this slot capacity of M.2 below 480GB is waste.

For reasons above, those 128/256GB drives come as bit too expensive. In slot where they achieve full bandwith, they lack space.
In other slot they do not perform that much better than SATA 6Gbps to justify price bump.

I mean, few days ago, I checked SSDs and even with our 21% tax and EU import price bump, there are 480GB SATA SSDs for $95. (That's double capacity/$.)
In M.2 sector, Kingston's 480GB with 3.0 x2 interface costs bit less.
Only reasonably priced Biostar unit here is 1TB. If they kept AM4 platform in mind and had x4 interface, that would be very different story.

So, I wonder if this is targeted just on intel platform, or some notebooks.

 

M500 model name for an SSD. Where have I seen that before? Couldn't they have come up with a different letter at least?