Introduction

Addlink is a fairly young Taiwanese hardware manufacturer founded in 2014. They specialize in all products related to flash storage, like USB sticks, SD memory cards, and SSDs.

In this review we’re taking a look at the Addlink S91, which is a highly compact M.2 NVMe drive in the 2230 form factor, which means it’s only 30 mm long. With such small dimensions it will fit as a storage upgrade for the Valve Steam Deck. You may also use the Addlink S91 to expand the storage of the ASUS ROG Ally game console and various Microsoft Surface Pro devices. Of course the drive will also fit into cases where an M.2 2242 PCIe drive has to be used.

While M.2 2230 drives have been on the market for a while, the Addlink S91 is available in a 2 TB capacity, which is quite rare for this form factor.

Internally, the Addlink S91 uses a Phison E21 controller, that we’ve seen on many other drives before. The NAND flash is 176-layer QLC from Micron. A DRAM cache chip is not installed, due to the limited space available. To connect with the rest of the system, the PCI-Express 4.0 interface is used.

The Addlink S91 is available in capacities of 512 GB ($53), 1 TB ($80) and 2 TB ($190). Endurance for these models is set to 300 TBW, 250 TBW and 450 TBW, respectively. Addlink includes a five-year warranty with the S91. Please note that the 512 GB version is built with Kioxia BiCS5 TLC flash (not Micron QLC), which also explains why that model has a higher endurance.