M.2 As Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2016-05-06
·
1,073 words · ~5 min read
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for decades now the clear trend in storage technology has been to make
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drives as small as possible and as fast
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as possible and we've gone from having four megabyte drives that are twice as
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big as your average refrigerator in the 1950s to multi-terabyte ssds that are
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not much bigger than a credit card yet can still move
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gigabits of data per second but even as popular as those speedy two
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and a half inch ssds are it became clear that with advancements in flash storage
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technology we could shrink our digital repositories down even smaller without
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sacrificing speed say hello my friends to m.2 a new interface for both ssds and
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expansion cards that promises higher speeds and less bulk you see although
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SATA 3 ssds offer huge performance gains
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compared to traditional mechanical hard drives that SATA interface that cable on
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the back itself has a pretty serious bottleneck topping out at about 550 to
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600 megabytes per second and while that may seem very fast and indeed it is
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flash storage has advanced very rapidly in recent years and is now capable of
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handling data much more quickly than SATA will allow and although SATA
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express which you can learn more about here was designed to alleviate this
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bottleneck it is pretty difficult to
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find SATA express drives on the market even though motherboards supporting it
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are out there fortunately though m.2 provides the same
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speed benefits as SATA express with the extra advantage of being much much
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smaller and more versatile many m.2
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drives actually utilize your computer's pci express bus with the fastest m.2
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drives currently on the market using a pci express 3.0 x4 connection
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translating to a theoretical maximum of four gigabytes per second
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and although you probably won't see real world speeds quite that high especially
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not right now current m.2 PCIe drives
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will still be much faster than a regular SATA SSD and should continue to get
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faster in the future m.2 is also useful for things other than
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storage devices you can get wi-fi and bluetooth cards that will fit into your
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motherboard's m.2 slot and take advantage of pci express speeds without
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having a you know large card plugged in or a dongle hanging out of your case and
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even if you're just using m.2 for storage you still get the additional
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benefit of not having to mess around with any power or signal cables slot in
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the card put in a screw and you are good to go but
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before you rush out to buy a new m.2 SSD or wireless adapter or whatever remember
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this not all m.2 cards and slots are the
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same faster m.2 drives will utilize the
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newest version of pci express that is 3.0 as of right now as well as the new
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NVMe standard for interacting with the rest of the system so be sure to check
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for these things before you buy especially as some m.2 drives use PCIe
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2.0 the older ahci protocol or even the
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existing SATA bus so they're basically just an msata card that fits in an m.2
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slot so in the case of that last one you won't see any performance benefit at all
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and you also have to pay attention to the physical layout of the card unlike
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SATA m.2 even though it only has one name uses several different connector
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types so most m.2 slots on current
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motherboards use either connectors b or
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m for ssds and a or e for wireless
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adapters now some cards are actually
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compatible with multiple motherboard connectors so just make sure that
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whatever you're buying you are checking before you pull the trigger and then
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finally size matters with m.2 every m.2 card
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regardless of its connector type will have a number indicating its dimensions
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such as 2242 which means that it's 22 millimeters by 42 millimeters just so
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just like how some cases will only fit graphics cards up to a certain length
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some motherboards and notebooks aren't compatible with longer m.2 devices
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so i guess the final word is this although there may be more to remember with m.2
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the extra speed and flexibility is
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probably worth having to pay a little bit of attention that is to say unless
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purchase all right guys so thanks for watching if you liked the video
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