M.2 As Fast As Possible

for decades now the clear trend in storage technology has been to make drives as small as possible and as fast as possible and we've gone from having four megabyte drives that are twice as big as your average refrigerator in the 1950s to multi-terabyte ssds that are not much bigger than a credit card yet can still move gigabits of data per second but even as popular as those speedy two and a half inch ssds are it became clear that with advancements in flash storage technology we could shrink our digital repositories down even smaller without sacrificing speed say hello my friends to m.2 a new interface for both ssds and expansion cards that promises higher speeds and less bulk you see although sata 3 ssds offer huge performance gains compared to traditional mechanical hard drives that sata interface that cable on the back itself has a pretty serious bottleneck topping out at about 550 to 600 megabytes per second and while that may seem very fast and indeed it is flash storage has advanced very rapidly in recent years and is now capable of handling data much more quickly than sata will allow and although sata express which you can learn more about here was designed to alleviate this bottleneck it is pretty difficult to find sata express drives on the market even though motherboards supporting it are out there fortunately though m.2 provides the same speed benefits as sata express with the extra advantage of being much much smaller and more versatile many m.2 drives actually utilize your computer's pci express bus with the fastest m.2 drives currently on the market using a pci express 3.0 x4 connection translating to a theoretical maximum of four gigabytes per second and although you probably won't see real world speeds quite that high especially not right now current m.2 pcie drives will still be much faster than a regular sata ssd and should continue to get faster in the future m.2 is also useful for things other than storage devices you can get wi-fi and bluetooth cards that will fit into your motherboard's m.2 slot and take advantage of pci express speeds without having a you know large card plugged in or a dongle hanging out of your case and even if you're just using m.2 for storage you still get the additional benefit of not having to mess around with any power or signal cables slot in the card put in a screw and you are good to go but before you rush out to buy a new m.2 ssd or wireless adapter or whatever remember this not all m.2 cards and slots are the same faster m.2 drives will utilize the newest version of pci express that is 3.0 as of right now as well as the new nvme standard for interacting with the rest of the system so be sure to check for these things before you buy especially as some m.2 drives use pcie 2.0 the older ahci protocol or even the existing sata bus so they're basically just an msata card that fits in an m.2 slot so in the case of that last one you won't see any performance benefit at all and you also have to pay attention to the physical layout of the card unlike sata m.2 even though it only has one name uses several different connector types so most m.2 slots on current motherboards use either connectors b or m for ssds and a or e for wireless adapters now some cards are actually compatible with multiple motherboard connectors so just make sure that whatever you're buying you are checking before you pull the trigger and then finally size matters with m.2 every m.2 card regardless of its connector type will have a number indicating its dimensions such as 2242 which means that it's 22 millimeters by 42 millimeters just so just like how some cases will only fit graphics cards up to a certain length some motherboards and notebooks aren't compatible with longer m.2 devices so i guess the final word is this although there may be more to remember with m.2 the extra speed and flexibility is probably worth having to pay a little bit of attention that is to say unless the thought of leaving all 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building your website today and when you do decide to sign up for squarespace use offer code linus we've got that linked in the video description to get 10 off on your first purchase all right guys so thanks for watching if you liked the video hit that like button if you disliked it you can hit the other button if you want to check out another video check out our channel super fun channel where we actually recently did like this wicked thing with like drunk goggles and wrapping christmas presents it's definitely worth a look leave a comment below if you have suggestions for future fastest possibles and as always don't forget to subscribe and follow and all that good stuff

Channel: Techquickie

Views: 3,556,902

Keywords: m.2, ssd, wi-fi, bluetooth, sata, express, nvme, pci express, pcie, usb, connector, drive, serial ata

Id: opwON-7J_wI

Length: 6min 13sec (373 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2015