The key thing to remember about M.2 is that it is a form factor, a shape. The bus—the data pathway over which the data travels to and from an M.2 drive—is distinct from M.2 itself and can vary. And it can make all the difference. (Credit: Molly Flores)

That's not a bad thing. Especially in the case of laptops, an older machine might support only M.2 SATA-bus SSDs, and that will be the boundary of your upgrade path...end of story. As a result, the only reasons you'd upgrade the drive, in that situation, would be to get more capacity, or if the old one failed.South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix is a relative newcomer to the consumer solid-state drive market, but you would never know that based on its first offerings. The SK Hynix Platinum P41, a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, is its best yet. It dominated our PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage benchmark testing, setting several new records in the process. The P41 supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. SK Hynix provides a clone utility tool, the SK Hynix System Migration Utility, for its SSDs, in addition to Easy Drive Manager software, which lets you see detailed information on drive health, run diagnostics, and erase the drive. And the P41 can be had for a very reasonable price in its 1TB and 2TB capacities. Who It's For We actually like these because often, you often get a robust heat sink on the M.2 drive. Some PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs can run hot under sustained read/write tasks and throttle their speed. That said, unless you're running a server or something similar, where a drive is constantly getting hammered with reads and writes, that's usually not something you have to worry about. That's because many of these drives are so fast, they get their transfer duties done before they have a chance to get all that hot. The M.2 platform is versatile and supports a wide variety of M.2 cards. M.2 cards can be configured with different hardware and functionality within the M.2 platform. (For example: To The M.2 standard has been the new upgrade in terms of SSDs. The M.2 SSD will come with a four-digit numbering that forms part of the specification and part number. The four digit number specifies the measurement of the drive. The first two digits indicate the width of the drive, while the last two digits indicate the length – both of them taken in millimetres.

You can easily fit smaller M.2 devices into larger M.2 slots. This is something that often trips up people who are building their first PCs. The M.2 slots size doesn’t refer to the connector that the M.2 uses, but rather the length of the card itself. Larger slots can easily accommodate smaller sized cards. If you are looking for a faster, thinner and quieter environment of working with your drives, this can be your best bet. It offers you a faster boot time. You get an extra performance as compared to the traditional options available through hard drives. The KingSpec drives to ensure you an excellent trouble free and reliable performance. So, you bought an empty device that’s not the right size for your motherboard. What are your options? The M.2 interface has three size specifications, M.2 2242, M.2 2260 and M.2 2280. These figures are not built or some technical acronyms. They simply represent the sizes of the SSDs as listed below: We all know that SSDs perform way better compared to conventional HDDs in terms of performance, power consumption and capacity. SATA, PCI-E, M.2 2242 and M.2 2280 are most commonly used SSD interfaces. If you are finding it hard to determine which one is best for you, this post will provide some help. Today, we will be talking about M.2 2242 and M.2 2280. Moreover, we also have the list of best products in each category so it would be even easier for you to choose one for yourself. Understand M.2 Interface:

SK Hynix Platinum P41

When it comes to an M.2 drive being too long, you’ve got some challenges ahead of you. The physical length of your M.2 device can’t be changed. You also typically can’t remove other components from your motherboard to make room. This means we’re going to have to get creative and think outside of the box to support an M.2 drive that’s physically too long.

One last caveat to drop in before we get to our product recommendations surrounds Intel's SSD line. Intel for a while sold a family of M.2-based storage products under the brand name Optane, in two very distinct types of drive. Intel's"Optane SSDs"were SSDs like any other, bootable drives that can serve as a stand-alone boot drive or as secondary storage. They were discontinued for consumers in 2021, but you may still see them around. (Intel sold its SSD business at the end of 2021 to SK Hynix, which spun it off into a new subsidiary, Solidigm.) The Crucial T500 is for users willing to pay a little extra to get the best PCI Express 4.0 SSD performance. At a time when many low-priced DRAM-less SSDs are hitting the market, the T500 has a full DRAM cache (as well as a top-shelf Phison controller and 232-layer TLC NAND flash), which could give it an advantage in sustained large-file transfers, as well as in use with the PS5. Advantage: PCI-E interface work at a high transfer speed because of the data is directly connected with CPU via the bus. The bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x4 even is up to 32Gbps.

Crucial T500

The next two digits are the length in millimeters. These range from 30 at the smallest to 110 at the largest. The numerical naming convention is used to define the size and functionality of the card, here is how ( Figure 1 [English only]): Are you looking to upgrade to the advanced device capability? The SSD supports capacities up to 512 GB. The next-gen SATA III performance that promises a 6GB per sec is another excellent feature.