SSD Confusion

[BabyPCMR]

So disregarding optane, there are m.2, nvme m.2, and sata. Is the regular m.2 faster than the 2.5 inch sata drives? Or is the better speed only on the nvme ssds?

 

I'm a bit confused.

 

Thanks in advance!

[Stevoisboss]

6 minutes ago, BabyPCMR said:

So disregarding optane, there are m.2, nvme m.2, and sata. Is the regular m.2 faster than the 2.5 inch sata drives? Or is the better speed only on the nvme ssds?

 

I'm a bit confused.

 

Thanks in advance!

You won't notice a difference in boot and basic operation. But in transferring files you will really notice a difference with nvme. M.2 has the potential if not overall faster than sata because it supports faster speeds.  

[seon123]

M.2 is a form factor. They can be SATA or NVMe drives. 

SATA based M.2 drives are no faster than 2,5" SATA drives

[Crunchy Dragon]

M.2 is faster in general I believe, not sure what the differences are between M.2 and NVMe M.2

 

Both are faster than SATA drives

[Enderman]

4 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

M.2 is faster in general I believe, not sure what the differences are between M.2 and NVMe M.2

 

Both are faster than SATA drives

M.2 sata SSDs are only slightly faster, or not at all, than regular 2.5" sata drives.

Only reason to get an M.2 sata drive is if you have no space for 2.5" drives.

NVME can actually take advantage of higher speeds of PCIe M.2

[Oshino Shinobu]

3 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

M.2 is faster in general I believe, not sure what the differences are between M.2 and NVMe M.2

 

Both are faster than SATA drives

M.2 is just a connector. M.2 drives can be NVMe or SATA drives and are the same speed (if they're SATA), just in a different form factor. 

 

NVMe uses the PCIe bus and is significantly faster than SATA drives. At least, on paper it is. For booting, OS use, gaming and most other random read/write based tasks, they're not really any faster than SATA in real world performance. Where they do make a difference is for sequential read/writes, so things like moving large files (provided whichever drives the files are being written to and read from can keep up and loading large files into RAM. They make excellent scratch drives to work from, but for the majority of consumers, they don't really offer much in terms of real world performance. 

[Guest]

44 minutes ago, BabyPCMR said:

So disregarding optane, there are m.2, nvme m.2, and sata. Is the regular m.2 faster than the 2.5 inch sata drives? Or is the better speed only on the nvme ssds?

 

I'm a bit confused.

 

Thanks in advance!

 M.2 drives can use the sata or NVMe interface in an 2.5" or sata form factor, and sata drives are generally the same speeds whether its an M.2 or 2.5" form factor, NVMe SSDs can vary in speeds.

 

NVMe is significantly faster then sata SSDs, NVMe and sata SSDs not commonly to be faster then each other when it comes to real world applications, such as booting or loading games, or general everyday use. NVMe SSDs are good for transferring large data/file clusters with blazzing fast read and write speeds to increase data transfer times and usually cost more then the traditional sata interface.