Quote Originally Posted by zombie67 View Post
Glad to see this form factor spread to the full size boards. No more data cables and power cables! Fast too.
Edit: If I understand correctly, the key is to look for NVMe (faster), instead of AHCI (slower). Newegg doesn't have a filter for that. They have PCIe 3.0 and PCIe 3.0 x4. Does PCIe 3.0 x4 = NVMe? Or are those different things?
They're different things. Your motherboard will decide the max throughput on the m.2 slot, up to PCIe x4. Cheaper boards reduce m.2 to x2 or even x1. Cheaper m.2 SSDs do the same. They just use the same SATA 3 controller on an m.2 form factor and obviously get the same ~500MB/s speed. The m.2 SSDs with controllers meant for the m.2 standard will make use of PCIe x4 in the m.2 socket.
As for NVMe, newer SSDs are moving to that, such as the Samsung 950's. It could be a pain, but until the NVMe aspect isn't so new, you may have to read individual item descriptions to see if something is NVMe or not.
Another note is boards that support m.2 also only support certain sizes, most commonly 2260 and 2280. 22110 is another fairly common size (22mm wide and 60, 80 or 110mm long).