Question about m.2 drives

[IrshaadH]

Do m.2 SATA drives take up PCI lanes? Are they quicker than 2.5in SATA SSDs?

 

Thanks

[Windows7ge]

3 minutes ago, IrshaadH said:

Do m.2 SATA drives take up PCI lanes?

Not 100% certain but it's using a PCI_e slot so I believe yes.

4 minutes ago, IrshaadH said:

Are they quicker than 2.5in SATA SSDs?

They are not. Speed wise they're in the same ballpark as any 2.5" SSD.

[spartaman64]

13 minutes ago, IrshaadH said:

Do m.2 SATA drives take up PCI lanes? Are they quicker than 2.5in SATA SSDs?

 

Thanks

i dont think it takes up pcie lanes because if it even takes up 1 pcie lane then its top speed is faster than sata and i never heard of a 900GB/s m.2 sata drive and it makes no sense for the manufacturers to artificially limit their products

[Turtle Rig]

3 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Not 100% certain but it's using a PCI_e slot so I believe yes.

They are not. Speed wise they're in the same ballpark as any 2.5" SSD.

Let me add to what you said.  A m.2 in the real world has no difference with SSD.  However if you benchmark the m.2 it will say 2500mbps while SSD says 550mbps but when I went from SSD to M.2 long long time ago I noticed everything was the same speed as the SSD.  Boot up time the same,  Map loading in games the same,  Your apps will launch the same time.  In real world there is no difference between SSD and M.2  .. Only thing is M.2 looks sexy.  But also it gets toasty, 25c higher then a SSD, but it's meant to get hot to work properly.

[mariushm]

No, SATA m.2 drives will use just SATA. The pci-e lanes remain unused in the connector.

Depending on motherboard, one or two regular SATA connectors will be disabled automatically.

 

A SATA SSD will have a speed of up to 560 MB/s, regardless if it's regular SATA or in m.2 form.

 

NVME (pci-e) SSDs can use 1 , 2 or 4 pci-e lanes to transfer data. Depending on pci-e version, you could have 500 MB/s per lane (for pci-e 2.0) or ~970 MB/s per lane (for pci-e 3.0).

So with a nvme m.2 SSD that can only use 2 pci-e lanes, if you install the SSD in a m.2 connector that uses pci-e 2.0 lanes, then your maximum speed would be 1 GB/s. While almost double than 560 MB/s, in real life, you would not notice the difference.