💾 Storage
M.2
M.2 is the physical shape and connector of a drive, not its speed. An M.2 slot can carry either a fast NVMe drive or a slower SATA one.
M.2 describes the small stick-shaped card format that plugs directly into the motherboard, replacing the cable-and-bay arrangement of older drives. The common length is 2280, meaning 22mm wide and 80mm long.
Crucially, M.2 says nothing about performance. Both NVMe and SATA drives are sold in M.2 form, and they look nearly identical — but a SATA M.2 drive is still capped at SATA speeds.
Motherboards also differ in what each M.2 slot supports. Some slots accept only NVMe, some only SATA, some either, and each slot has its own PCIe generation limit.