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April 16th, 2019 17:00
M2.sata VS. Usb drive
Is the M2.sata drive faster than a regular USB thumb drive, maybe USB 3.0? Thanks!
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This post is more than 5 years old
1 Rookie
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April 16th, 2019 17:00
Is the M2.sata drive faster than a regular USB thumb drive, maybe USB 3.0? Thanks!
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Dell-Alan D
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April 17th, 2019 03:00
@RoscoePColtrane M.2 is a form factor rather than a type of drive. The M.2 can be both SATA or NVME and the speeds between those two types vary enormously.
If it's a SATA M.2 drive then the speed is limited by the SATA bus which could support up to 600 MB/S if it's SATA3 the board is running. NVME on the other hand can support up to 3500 MB/S. More information can be found at this non-Dell approved link - https://www.velocitymicro.com/blog/nvme-vs-m-2-vs-sata-whats-the-difference/
USB 3.0 can support up to 640 MB/S depending on the spec. That's not to different to an M.2 SATA drive so there speeds are quite comparable. If it's an NVME M.2 drive then it's considerably faster than USB 3.0
Alan
RoscoePColtrane
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April 17th, 2019 12:00
I guess if I made an external drive with an NVME it would choke on the USB interface that I would have to use. I'll stick to my WD externals and my thumb drives and be slow for now.
RoscoePColtrane
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April 17th, 2019 05:00
Thanks for the info. I was considering building a backup portable drive using the M.2 sata enclosure by Sabrent but it doesn't sound like it would be any faster than a good thumb drive. I need to investigate the NVME technology. I transfer a lot of huge files from time to time. I have used M2.sata in some Lenovo laptops and found it much faster than a standard hard drive.
jphughan
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April 17th, 2019 06:00
M.2 SATA drives tend to be much faster than even high-end flash drives like the SanDisk Extreme Pro USB 3.1 that can do very fast reads AND writes (unlike most flash drives that only offer somewhat fast reads and slow writes), although whether an SSD is worth the additional cost is a separate question. But they’re also available in higher capacities of course. If you go this route, look at the Samsung 860 Evo, or just look at the Samsung T5, which is Samsung’s retail offering of an M.2 SATA SSD in a nice enclosure.
M.2 NVMe is a whole other animal, but it would be severely bottleneckd by even USB 3.1 Gen 2, and NVMe to USB chips have only just hit the market and seem a bit unreliable at the moment. But due to the bottleneck, they exist mainly to facilitate data recovery from such SSDs on another system. To properly use an external NVMe SSD, you’d need a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, but that’s much more expensive and it isn’t currently backward compatible with USB at all, so that will limit the systems you can use it with. Intel recently introduced a new Thunderbolt “Titan Ridge” controller that would offer backward compatibility with USB (at reduced performance), but I don’t know if that’s in any products yet. The Samsung X5 is an example of such a retail NVMe SSD in a Thunderbolt enclosure though.