Storage devices

Abdul Samad · January 22, 2017

I was a bit confused about some question related to SSD.
If you can help me these confusion please help in detail.
Thanks in advance
1.Whats the differnce between 2.5 and 3.5 SSD. I want to know their speed,size,compabilty and images of both.
2.What is NVME. Are they connected through PCI-e. Can anymotherboard with PCI-e can run them. what is thier speed.
3.What are M.2 SSD. Are they connected through PCI-e or with some other connectors. Are they connected prependicular to motherboard or parallel. What are theier speed.
4.can internal ssd can be attach to PCI-e using some converter. what would be affect on speed.
5.What is SATA-express and it is used for. Is it same as PCI express
6.What is esata can i attach my internal SSD to it with some converter and what speed would i get.

joshfrog · January 22, 2017

1 the difference between 2.5 and 3.5 is just the side of the disk its self 2.5 inch drives are used alot in laptops and 3.5 inch drives are used in desktops and servers

however most ssds come in a 2.5 inch drive size unless its an m.2 or msata drive thet use a difference connector and are very small.

2 nvme means Non-Volatile Memory Express its anew type of drive that uses the pci-e connection bus rather then the sata. there is m.2 nvme ssds and pci-e ssds in that case it means the connection it plugs in to but both run over the pci-e bus

and no not all motherboards support nvme it needs to be enabled in the bios and not all boards support it.

3 is mixed in with the above

4 yes you could connect a sata ssd to pci-e though a raid card or host adapter but speed wont go up because it still uses sata and is limited by sata.

5 sata express was a new connection that got added but it failed for the most part against m.2 and pci-e its faster then sata but slower then many nvme ssds

in terms of speed there are many things that change this a sata drive is limited to 6gbps, most ssds will max out at about 550mbps while hard drives in ether 2.5 or 3.5 inch speeds vary on lots of things such as amount of platters the hardware they put in it the speed the disks spin and how the data is stored on the platters most are around 100-200mbps and nvme ssds can go in to the gigabytes per second the samsung 960 evo can do 3.2gbps in read and 1.7gbps in write some are faster and some are slower. hope this helped there is alot of differences between them and it can get annoying working out what the differences are. also just to make it harder some motherboards have an m.2 connector on them but it doesnt used the pci-e standard it uses sata, it just happens to be in a much smaller form factor.