The reason for this confusion is that originally there was a Mini-SATA (mSATA) standard for SSDs which used the PCIe Mini Card form factor, which evolved into the M.2 form factor as well as the U.2 interface. Checking the manual for the board in question is a good idea too.
Often the mainboard’s silkscreen next to the M.2 slot will mention what technology an M.2 slot can accept. Yet even an M.2 slot with a solid-state drive (SSD) in it may not even be an NVMe slot or SSD, since SATA also uses this interface. Let’s take an in-depth look at the wonderful and wacky world of NVMe, shall we?ĭeceiving Appearances Diagram of the elements in SATA Express, functionally similar to M.2.Īsk anyone what an NVMe slot on a computer mainboard looks and they’ll be inclined to show you a picture of an M.2 slot, as this has become the most used standard within consumer electronics for solid-state storage devices. Who can keep M.2 and U.2 apart, let alone which protocol the interface speaks, be it SATA or NVMe? NVMe is also different for not being bound to a single interface or connector, which can be confusing. Ultimately Parallel ATA became Serial ATA ( SATA) and Parallel SCSI became Serial Attached SCSI ( SAS), with SATA being used primarily in laptops and desktop systems until the arrival of NVMe along with solid-state storage.Īll of these interfaces were designed to keep up with the attached storage devices, yet NVMe is a bit of an odd duck considering the way it is integrated in the system. This led to the use of DMA-based transfers ( UDMA interface, also called Ultra ATA and Parallel ATA), along with DMA-based SCSI interfaces over on the Apple and mostly server side of the computer fence. This would drive up the need for a faster link between storage and the rest of the system, which up to that point had largely used the ATA interface in Programmed Input-Output ( PIO) mode. By the 1990s hard drive-based storage had become commonplace, allowing many megabytes and ultimately gigabytes of data to be stored.
The first generations of home computers used floppy disk and compact cassette-based storage, but gradually, larger and faster storage became important as personal computers grew in capabilities. The most recent player is the Non-Volatile Memory Express ( NVMe), something of a hybrid of what has come before. The history of storage devices is quite literally a race between the medium and the computing power as the bottleneck of preserving billions of ones and zeros stands in the way of computing nirvana.
0 kommentar(er)
