Why are they so expensive?
I understand that NVME M.2 SSDs are expensive, but I know people who charge HALF what you charge for these drives. Does Purism do something special to make it more expensive?
For people that use these, how much noticeably faster are they?
I may be a tech nerd, but there are two things I hate with computers, fixing hardware, lack of freedom/privacy/security, and waiting for it to boot/load. How much noticeably faster is this?
I think it is honestly one area they can use to recoup the expenses of manufacturing components. They are not able to leverage massive order savings like larger companies, and so they simply pay more to produce their products.
The beauty is, you can order it without one, and then put it in yourself. No harm no fool.
Look at the specs and reviews. NVME is faster. However, what I’ve noticed is that SSDs in general are so much faster that you can be happy with either.
I have a NVME from Purism in mine. It was fast, but as it was smaller than the SSD, I switched back to using the bigger SSD as the boot drive. I do however use the NVME as storage for the VMs I run. Excellent performance there.
@2disbetter Thank you for your response.
The main thing I want to be sure of is that it isn’t like the Intel CPU where they de-blobed a bunch of stuff that normal vendors wouldn’t.
I do however use the NVME as storage for the VMs I run
I hadn’t thought of this, can you store different OSes on different drives? .
How do I do this? 
do you mean different drives as actually multiple NVME drives ? that would be quite expensive since you would need motherboard support for NVME and multiple phisical mount slots for them. or you could use a dedicated pcie mount board for m2 NVMEs. at that point you will also need to deal with the temperatures as NVME gets quite hot when written to heavily.
I meant more like the 2.5" SATA 3 SSD running PureOS and the M.2 SSD running Arch. Similar to a dual boot option. This way I can keep storage separate for privacy/security and choose upon boot.
I’ve been considering running some games via Lutris in a VM (possibly via multi-booting QubesOS) or maybe dual boot an OS and since @2disbetter mentioned something similar I figured I would ask if ya’ll had any tips.
What I meant was that my SSD is my boot drive. I do not have any other OS that is bootable outside of PureOS. I’m fairly certain you can dual boot, as coreboot lets you select a drive upon boot if you want. You would just need to make sure you had grub or whatever on the drives you wanted to boot with.
What I’m doing is used a SSD (2.5 kind) as my boot drive because it is larger. I then mount the NVME (which is smaller) in PureOS and use it as storage for the virtual machines that I am running. This includes a windows development environment and another Linux VM which I also use for developing purposes.
So I’m not dual booting using two drives, although I think such a thing is possible.
I’ve both in my Librem13v3 and it’s pretty fast, but no REAL (read: measurable, yes) difference.
Why not both?