I’m starting to find my external backup drive is getting too small to back my data partition up fully (I have a large second internal hard drive that does still get the job done automatically every day) so I was looking at possible options. I always just gone straight for SATA connected drives, and have small SSDs for boot, and then 4TB SATA hard drives for data and internal backups.
But I had a good look at my motherboard (which is not very old) and noticed it has two M.2 2280 M-key socket which support both SATA and x4 PCI Express (yes I’m still figuring out the generations). Supposedly then, a NVMe SSD drive card can fit into that socket.
And it seems that the NVMe SSD (non-SATA) is blindingly faster than a SATA drive! Yes it can cost maybe 25% than a SATA SSD, but speeds can be easily 6x or 10x faster than the SSD.
So I’m doing more homework on this, as my older 120GB SATA SSD drives are getting a bit tight on space too for my Linux boot drive. I’m considering maybe 256GB for the boot drive and 2TB for the data drive.
The linked video did give me some overview as to the different choices regarding drives and their connectors and protocols.
The thing is to have a good look first at what your motherboard can fit. Buy something faster, as long as it fits, because if you later upgrade the motherboard, you’ll gain that extra speed for your faster storage device.