Little by little storage is moving from using the SATA port to taking advantage of the advantages of PCI Express. However, we rarely see expansion cards of this type being used as storage units in stores. Why is there barely SSD to PCIe beyond the topic of laptops?
The M.2 interface used by NVMe SSDs is nothing more than a PCI Express interface with up to 4 lanes, but with another type of connector designed for this type of microcards. However, for some time those who need an SSD in a desktop PC have had to choose between the higher storage capacity of SATA drives for 2.5-inch bays or the faster speed of SATA M drives. .2. This is all because the U.2 format is typical for servers and data centers and no commercial motherboard supports it. This is where PCIe SSDs come in.
The only option, SSD on PCI Express cards
Well, technically an M.2 is a PCI Express card, small in size and in another format, but after all, its interface is still PCI-Express. Although in this case we are referring to full profile expansion cards.
Here we can find three different types of different units:
- In the first type we can see an expansion board with its complete circuit. In this case, the flash controller dominates the board, along with the flash memory chips and RAM memory for address calculation and as a data cache. They are not faster than a classic M.2 in terms of transfer, but they support more memory channels and with them more storage chips and therefore more Teras to store the data.
- The second type is an adapter that connects to a PCI Express x16 slot and allows us to connect up to 4 traditional M.2 drives to the PC. Let us not forget that one of the capacities of the parallel interface par excellence is the possibility of distributing the lines of communication between several different peripherals at the same time. Some high-end motherboards include them among their accessories.
- There are also units with an x8 connector that support that we can install 2 M.2.
- Finally, we have a variant of the second, which allows you to connect a large number of units, but cutting the bandwidth of each of them. For example, we may have in our hands a card that supports 16 M.2 drives. Well, in this case it must be taken into account that each unit will correspond to a PCI Express line and therefore 25% of its bandwidth.
In any case, we have a complete tutorial on this type of much more detailed card that we advise you to consult.
Not all motherboards have another slot for an SSD over PCIe
There are a lot of motherboards where the manufacturer assumes that the only expansion card that requires an x16 connection is the graphics card, and since home games only support one, we already know what’s going on. However, if you are lucky enough to have such a dual-slot model, a good application may be to use it to increase storage capacity.
Also, if you are planning to set up a home NAS, since you won’t need more than the standard integrated graphics card, basically for this task you don’t need more than that. Well, if you’ve chosen to recycle an old tower PC that has at least one Mini-ITX, you’ll know that it has a PCI Express x16 socket to plug this type of card into.
Trouble is, that’s a bad idea, because network access completely negates the benefits of using a PCI Express SSD, whether traditional or M.2. So we don’t recommend it at all. Plus, you’ll end up paying a lot more for the terabyte of information. However, we must start from the fact that if we set up a multimedia server to transmit content to several devices at the same time, the fact that it supports several simultaneous accesses can make it possible to avoid interruptions during the diffusion.
