What is an M.2 SSD?
Today we’re going to talk about M.2 SSD a Non-Volatile Memory Express Solid-State Drives or SSDs. Nowadays these drives are moderately new and have only been around for a few years now and now most of the computers, Laptops and even mobile devices are using them.
2.5-inch SSDs that we’re more familiar with and M.2 SSDs also use flash memory for data storage, and they are very fast. But the difference between a regular 2.5-inch SSD and an M.2 SSD is that the M.2 is a totally different form feature and it connects to a different type of slot.
The M.2 which was formerly known as the next-generation form feature is a standard that’s used for mounting expansion cards internally.
Now SSDs have intensely passed mechanical hard drives as far as speed and this is because SSDs have no moving parts. Because they use flash memory for data storage as compared to mechanical hard drives that use rotating magnetic disks to store data.
But in recent years SSDs have gotten faster and are more capable of moving data at a faster rate. So, to unlock the full capability of SSDs engineers needed a new technology to unlock the faster speeds of SSDs and that’s where M.2 and NVM Express come in.
Now previous to M.2 and NVM Express the latest interface standard that was widely used for hard drives and SSDs was SATA 3.0 and the standard that was used for an interface for software to communicate with SATA was the advanced host controller interface which is better known as AHCI.
Now AHCI was developed mainly for mechanical hard drives. It was not made or enhanced for SSDs and that’s mainly because it dates to 2004. So, it was creating a bottleneck for today’s SSDs.
The SATA 3.0 bus with AHCI allows data transfer speeds at a theoretical rate of 600 Megabytes per second, which is fast. However, M.2 NVM Express SSDs do not use the SATA bus. They instead use the PCI Express bus, which is much faster than SATA.
By using the PCI Express bus with an optimized protocol like NVM Express these allow SSDs to transfer data at a rate of 3 Gigabytes per second, which is extremely fast. M.2 SSDs with NVM Express are roughly 5 times faster than SATA and AHCI. Now this speed will vary depending upon what motherboard you are using and which SSD. But regardless it’s still a lot faster than SATA SSDs.
NVMe or Non-Volatile Memory
NVMe or Non-Volatile Memory Express is a communications protocol specifically developed for SSDs. It basically reduces the CPU overhead and streamlines operations which lowers latency and Increases input and output operations per second in other words it’s fast.
NVM Express was developed to fully take advantage of the capability of PCI Express storage devices and to perform many of the input/output operations in parallel meaning that many calculations are done at the same time. A large job is broken down into several smaller jobs that can be processed independently.
