Terminology confusion between PCI Express 3.0 and M.2

aditya_chauhan

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Jan 20, 2015
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Is there a difference between PCIe 3.0 and M.2? NVMe drives are plugged into PCIe or M.2? Also, which interface is faster: PCIe plugged drives or M.2 plugged ones? Thanks A2A
 
Solution
they are each special slots to plus stuff into. normally the pcie slot is for gpu's since it is nice and fast. the newer m.2 slots use the same pcie lanes that the pcie slot uses, just not as many. they should be equally as fast since they both use the same lanes. if you look at the spec sheet most of the time using an m.2 slot turns off some pcie lanes from the pcie slots.

the difference in the drive should be what slot it fits into for the most part.

Math Geek

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they are each special slots to plus stuff into. normally the pcie slot is for gpu's since it is nice and fast. the newer m.2 slots use the same pcie lanes that the pcie slot uses, just not as many. they should be equally as fast since they both use the same lanes. if you look at the spec sheet most of the time using an m.2 slot turns off some pcie lanes from the pcie slots.

the difference in the drive should be what slot it fits into for the most part.
 
Solution

wildcard1978

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Not fully correct. M.2 drives share pics bug or piggy back it would be the same if used a m.w ad in card. But thier are newer onboard m.2 slots that don't share the pci bus at all and are routed straight to the cpu and would use cpu pci express lanes and not the main boards pics bus make sense
 

wildcard1978

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Nvme are new controllers for ssds that a very fast so far the they only make em for m.2 but m.2 is faster then pci express atm specially with a nvme drive and even faster on boards that specifically rout the pathways of the m.2 slot straight to the cpu they used to have m.2 slots share the pci express bus
 

wildcard1978

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Apr 15, 2015
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Nvme are new controllers for ssds that a very fast so far the they only make em for m.2 but m.2 is faster then pci express atm specially with a nvme drive and even faster on boards that specifically rout the pathways of the m.2 slot straight to the cpu they used to have m.2 slots share the pci express bus