The decline in SSD prices has made many M.2 SSDs more widely available.However, many people find that their M.2 SSD runs at the same speed as the original SATA hard disk drive or is slower than others. This article will help you identify the difference between SATA and Pcie m.2 SSD.
What is m.2 SSD?
In fact, M.2 is just a hard disk interface. The M.2 interface can be connected to either a high-speed PCIe channel or a low-speed SATA channel. The M.2 drive can be a SATA (eg, Crucial MX500 M.2) and an NVMe (such as the Samsung 970 Pro), which describes a bus protocol for communicating with other PC components.
How to distinguish the M.2 SSD?
How do you distinguish whether the M.2 SSD is a SATA or a high-speed PCIe channel? The simpler way is to see if there are any labels such as PCIe, PCI-E, and NVMe on the hard disk driver. If there is no any label, it is likely to be low-speed SATA ssd.
What are the bus speeds of pcie?
The M.2 interface using the PCIe (NVMe) bus has different types, namely Socket 2 (B key) and Socket 3 (M Key). The former uses PCIe × 2 channels, the theoretical maximum speed is 2000MB/s, the latter supports PCIe × 4 channels,and the theoretical maximum speed can reach 4000MB/s. Similarly, the speeds detected by M.2 SSDs may different, if they are NVMe SSDs that are not the same interface speed standard.
NVMe speed vs SATA?
Most motherboards use SATA III with a maximum speed of 600MB / s (or 300MB / s for SATA II). With the SATA bus, most SSDs will provide 530~500 MB per second read and write speeds.
The M.2 can connect the PCIe channel to the interface. As a result,PCIe-based M.2 SSDs use the NVMe protocol for fast boot and easy management speeds of up to 2000M/s. Currently, the faster SSD is the Samsung 960 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD, which provides continuous read speeds approaching 3500M/s. Of course,its processing speed is faster, and the price will be very expensive.
On the other hand, buying NVMe SSDs costs more. Given the cost of speeding up our laptops, we don't have to choose expensive NVMe SSDs.
Design of m.2 interface
The front and back of the SSD interface of Socket 2 is 5+6 gold fingers,and the motherboard slot generally has 5 contacts. The front and back of the SSD interface of Socket 3 is 4+5 gold fingers, and the motherboard slot has 4 contacts. Now, most M.2 SSDs use a three-stage gold finger to be compatible with both interfaces. For two-stage gold fingers only for the specific structure interface.
Width and length of m.2 SSD
Some motherboards with multiple M.2 interfaces may have slots that only support 60 mm (22x60) or even 42 mm (22x42) length SSD standards.
There is also an SSD with a specification of 80 mm length (22x80). Before buying, you need to know the hard disk slot need what size of M.2 SSD.
For interface and configuration query, you can find in the Official support center based on your laptop model number.
How to buy the right m.2 SSD?
First, the SSD interface and size must meet the requirements of the motherboard.
The most important point is that before buying a m.2 SSD, you need to find out which protocol's m.2 interface the computer's motherboard supports. If the motherboard only supports the SATA bus, but you have spent a lot of money to buy a solid-state drive that supports PCIe, which will be a big waste.
In addition, the read/write rate of some high-speed SSDs is very fast.If you find the read speed reaches the interface standard, and the write speed is only half or even lower, maybe related to the SSD master performance iTunes.
M.2 SSD vs SATA SSD speed test?
HD Tune Pro is a hard disk utility software with many functions. Of course, you can use it to test the read and write speed of m.2 SSD. You only need to download and install it, run it to get the test results.
After starting the test HD Tune will perform several tests to measure the performance of the hard disk. You can view the SSD data in the software displayed interface.
This article is about how much faster is m.2 than ssd, if it helps you,I hope you can share it with your friends. More laptop replacement parts and laptop parts information refer to GEMWON blog.
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