Thank You for sharing & posting this great deal. ...no offense intended, but looking for experience WRT power draw of over 8 watts & potential heat concern for M.2.
I think 2.5A is the maximum possible peak current. It certainly doesn't use that much all the time.
They don't get very hot in normal usage.
According to the actual Micron data sheet, the 960gb M.2 SATA drive is idle average 1.5W, Seq Write <5W , Seq. Read, <5W.
So that's not much and very normal for this kind of drive.
I did some "worst case" testing, using a CoolerMaster Elite 130 case, which has only marginal cooling. The drive was in a PCIe adapter card, which pretty much shielded it from any airflow. Idle temperature was a very constant 32C. I wrote a couple hundred GB of randomly selected data off an external drive on a USB 3.0 connection and temps got to 36C, but then settled back down to 34C for the majority of the process (Windows 10 + HWINFO64).
Power draw was right around where
@larrysb said. 1.1w at idle (drive out vs drive in). During writes I couldn't isolate the drive, but draw was only up about 9w for the whole system, including CPU/RAM cycles etc. (Kill-A-Watt EZ)
One thing for prospective buyers: This isn't a "single-sided" drive, there's components on both sides. It still fit the PCIe carrier card just fine, but you can't use the the thermal pad & PCB metallic plate that some add-in cards & motherboards include for cooling with a single-sided drive.
Tested using:
Asus P9D-I
Pentium G3220T w/Stock Cooler
8GB ECC UDIMM (2x4GB)
Samsung 850 EVO boot drive.
As an aside, even though I asked for Micron branded per the seller's instructions, they sent me Cisco. I suppose that might have been all that was left, no telling. So, now I get to try to figure out if there's updated firmware and if I can update it or not without a Cisco server.
Micron's StorageExecutive software picked up the Cisco branded drive and did a firmware update just fine. Sometimes I worry for nothing.