-
T-Mobile Home Internet: Revisiting 5G connectivity for the home after two years
-
Multi-million dollar Cheyenne supercomputer auction ends with $480,085 bid — buyer walked away with 8,064 Intel Xeon Broadwell CPUs, 313TB DDR4-2400 ECC RAM, and some water leaks
Which kind of storage is faster M.2 or PCI-E ???
- Thread starter Lycaone
- Start date
Solution
aces19
Reputable
- Aug 27, 2015
- 816
- 0
- 5,360
Most people who aren't crazy enthusiants (me inluded) will go for m.2 drive. I can't really comment on which is faster, but I prefer m.2 for not only it's steady availability but its small, compact size which doesn't get in the way, even in a mini itx build. They both have similar speeds, so I wouldn't really be worried about that.
shrapnel_indie
Distinguished
- Jan 21, 2010
- 2,151
- 10
- 20,915
Since, to the best of my knowledge ALL PCIe add-on card based SSDs are PCIe....
a PCIe card based SSD and a M.2 SSD using PCIe instead of SATA, will be about equal, assuming they both use the same amount of PCIe lanes and if both are NVMe or not. If there is a single difference in NVMe PCIe lane or PCIe spec, it can effect the final speed. SATA based M.2 will pretty much match any conventional 2.5" SATA3 SSD, in last place for speed.
a PCIe card based SSD and a M.2 SSD using PCIe instead of SATA, will be about equal, assuming they both use the same amount of PCIe lanes and if both are NVMe or not. If there is a single difference in NVMe PCIe lane or PCIe spec, it can effect the final speed. SATA based M.2 will pretty much match any conventional 2.5" SATA3 SSD, in last place for speed.
This seems to be a pretty common confusion regarding SSD terminology.
M.2 is specifically a "form factor" as in it's pretty much a type of connector.
PCIe is an interface bus standard but like most interfaces, it also includes a form factor traditionally, (ie PCIe slots on a moterboard).
SATA is an interface similar to PCIe but more specifically for storage devices.
NVMe is a newer SSD specific interface standard that talks using the more general PCIe bus, but comes in a few different form factors.
So when talking SSDs, there are two aspects, the drive form factor and the communication interface.
The common ones are M.2 NVMe, M.2 SATA, 2.5" SATA (2.5" is a legacy term from HDDs that refers to the physical footprint of the drive)
PCIe allows for much higher bandwidth than SATA. For SSDs, the SATA interface is the bottleneck in raw performance. Think of it similar to Ethernet vs Fiber internet. So for SSDs, NVMe drives, which talks over PCIe, can achieve much higher speeds.
The latest PCIe standard (Gen3) allows up to 8 lanes of communication. However, the M.2 form factor only utilized 2-4 lanes. There are PCIe NVMe SSDs (called AIC form factor) that plug directly into PCIe slots on a motherboard which can utilize the full 8 lanes. These are generally all very expensive enterprise class drives and see very limited use in some high performance servers.
For a regular consumer, it's more just simply SATA vs NVMe and as stated above, NVMe allows for much higher performance than SATA. For a regular consumer, that would be M.2 NVMe >> M.2 SATA = 2.5" SATA for SSDs you can buy currently.
M.2 is specifically a "form factor" as in it's pretty much a type of connector.
PCIe is an interface bus standard but like most interfaces, it also includes a form factor traditionally, (ie PCIe slots on a moterboard).
SATA is an interface similar to PCIe but more specifically for storage devices.
NVMe is a newer SSD specific interface standard that talks using the more general PCIe bus, but comes in a few different form factors.
So when talking SSDs, there are two aspects, the drive form factor and the communication interface.
The common ones are M.2 NVMe, M.2 SATA, 2.5" SATA (2.5" is a legacy term from HDDs that refers to the physical footprint of the drive)
PCIe allows for much higher bandwidth than SATA. For SSDs, the SATA interface is the bottleneck in raw performance. Think of it similar to Ethernet vs Fiber internet. So for SSDs, NVMe drives, which talks over PCIe, can achieve much higher speeds.
The latest PCIe standard (Gen3) allows up to 8 lanes of communication. However, the M.2 form factor only utilized 2-4 lanes. There are PCIe NVMe SSDs (called AIC form factor) that plug directly into PCIe slots on a motherboard which can utilize the full 8 lanes. These are generally all very expensive enterprise class drives and see very limited use in some high performance servers.
For a regular consumer, it's more just simply SATA vs NVMe and as stated above, NVMe allows for much higher performance than SATA. For a regular consumer, that would be M.2 NVMe >> M.2 SATA = 2.5" SATA for SSDs you can buy currently.
TRENDING THREADS
-
News Apple debuts M4 processor in new iPad Pros with 38 TOPS on neural engine- Started by Admin
- Replies: 63
-
News Firefox user loses 7,470 opened tabs saved over two years after they can’t restore browsing session
- Started by Admin
- Replies: 54
-
Question Sapphire RX 5700 XT Nitro+ is not working in main PCIe slot ?
- Started by digows
- Replies: 24
-
Question Windows 10 only launches in safe mode, otherwise blue screen at boot.- Started by Scar667
- Replies: 3
-
Question I replaced my broken Mother Board and now my windows wont start- Started by Crystal_B
- Replies: 16
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram