ROUND 1

Performance

You might think the choice between oldschool magnetic drives, conventional SATA SSDs, and the latest M.2 items was a total no-brainer. For the most part, you’d be right. Magnetic drives, with their quaintly spinning platters and delicately servo’ed read heads, certainly don’t stand a chance when it comes to raw performance. They’re OK at sequential workloads, albeit offering about one tenth the speed of a decent SSD at best, but they really suck when it comes to random access.

SATA SSDs, meanwhile, may be pretty quick, even by modern standards, but they’re ultimately held back by both the SATA interface itself, which caps peak performance at about 550MB/s, and the elderly AHCI control protocol, which was never intended to be used with solid-state tech.

So it’s M.2 and its zippy PCI Express interconnect that easily rules the day, with the latest drives topping 3GB/s for peak performance, and packing the highly optimized NVMe control protocol. The catch is system compatibility, and that’s why M.2 isn’t a complete nobrainer. Especially for older PCs, a SATA SSD may be the most painless path to decent storage performance.

Winner: M.2 NVMe