![]() This works like a charm on a Thunderbolt Mac that’s new enough to run High Sierra. On the off-chance you’re using one of the rare Windows PCs that supports Thunderbolt (many with Asus motherboards do), you may be able to use an external Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure to add NVMe to your system. A U.2 connection features four Gen 3 PCIe lanes, two SATA ports, plus sideband channels and both 3.3-volt and 12-volt power, but it’s found only in enterprise-level storage adapters and systems. These require the U.2 need SFF-8639 (Small Form Factor) connector. What you as an end user should avoid are 2.5-inch NVMe drives. Plextor’s M9Pe and others are available already mounted on PCIe cards as ready-to-rock products. If your socket lets you down, it’s time for the $25 PCIe M.2 adapter card that I mentioned. Shown here is WD’s Black NVMe SSD-a very worthy drive that sustains transfers better than its Samsung 970 EVO competitor. While our testbed’s M.2 slot supports PCIe and NVMe, yours may not. These are also sometimes referred to as socket 2 and socket 3. If you have a B/M-keyed slot with both sets of contacts separated, the most common today, you’re golden. There is no hard-and-fast rule, but many B-key slots were SATA-only. The former, called B-keyed (a key is a rise that marries with a gap in the contacts on the drive), has six contacts separated from the rest, while the latter, M-keyed, has five contacts separated from the rest on the opposite side. There’s no way to tell from looking at a slot whether it supports PCIe and NVMe, but you can tell the difference between an PCIe x2 and PCIe x4 slot. Note that the MSATA slot, which is the precursor to M.2, looks very similar. Read your system or motherboard user’s guide, or check online. M.2 was designed to support USB 3.0, SATA, and PCIe, and most early M.2 slots supported only SATA. But simply having an M.2 slot doesn’t guarantee NVMe compatibility. There’s simply no benefit to the vendors to add it, and a very real downside: You’re less likely to upgrade a system that’s been updated with NVMe, unless you play PC games or do something truly CPU-intensive, like editing 2160p (4K)/4320p(8K) video.Īn M.2 NVMe SSD such as the relatively affordable and very fast (except for extremely large transfers) Samsung 970 EVO can live in a M.2/PCIe slot, or in a regular PCIe slot (x4 or greater) by means of a cheap adapter card.Īll NVMe SSDs being sold in the consumer space use the M.2 form factor, though there are other connectors (see below). Most older mainstream BIOS’s do not support booting from NVMe and most likely, never will. To benefit fully from an NVMe SSD, you must be able to boot the operating system from it. ![]() All recent versions of the major operating systems provide drivers, and regardless of the age of the system you will have a very fast drive on your hands. It’s obviously best if your system already supports NVMe and has M.2 slots, but it’s still possible to add an NVMe drive to any PC with an PCIe slot via a $25 adapter card. We’ve already seen that caching employed by the super-cheap Toshiba RC100 we recently reviewed, which forgoes that onboard DRAM cache that most NVMe drives use, but still performs well enough to give your system that NVMe kick in the pants for everyday chores. The NVMe standard has continued to evolve to the present version 1.31, with the addition of such features as the ability to use part of your computer’s system memory as a cache. Even version 3.3 is far slower slower than what today’s SSD technology is capable of, especially in RAID configurations. Though the SATA bus has evolved to 16Gbps as of version 3.3, nearly all commercial implementations remain 6Gbps (roughly 550MBps after communications overhead). Knowing well the ultimate performance potential of NAND-based SSDs even when they first showed up, it was clear to the industry that a new bus and protocol would eventually be needed. But, as the first SSDs were relatively slow (and bulky), it proved far more convenient to use the existing SATA storage infrastructure. But for your operating system, programs, and oft-used data, you want an NVMe SSD if your system supports it, or a SATA SSD if it can’t. Hard drives still offer tremendous bang for the buck in terms of capacity and are wonderful for less-used data. Some drives in each category might do better, some will do worse. Shorter bars are better, but this is an overall average. HD = 2-5 millisecond seek, SATA SSD = 0.2 millisecond seek, NVMe SSD = 0.02 millisecond seek. The CPU and GPU development curve pales in comparison to that of storage over the last 10 years. ![]() HDD = 200MBps, SATA SSD = 550MBps, NVMe SSD = 3GBps. Not that you need sustained throughput like this very often, but NVMe makes short work of transferring files of any size. ![]()
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