Drive Connection Tech

Drive Connections

So SSD’s are great, but at the same time I also have the feeling that we’re reaching the limits of SSD performance in a standard form factor. The Kingston is an M.2 drive (formerly known as the so called “Next Generation Form Factor” or NGFF) which definitely fills a need for the ultra-compact laptop segment of the market. What it doesn’t really do though is bring any extra speed to the party, unless you’re choosing carefully. For that, you need either an M.2 drive which uses PCIE rather than SATA, or a straightforward PCIE SSD.

Ahhh for the good old days of IDE and that was it! You got your platter drive and got the one with the highest RPM you could and would be damn well happy with it! I know I’m a bit of a fossil but there we go. Now of course, we have SATA drives, and PCIE drives. But besides that, we have SATA connectors, M.2 connectors and PCIE connectors. If you have a SATA connector, it’s a SATA drive, simple right? Then at the other end of the spectrum, you have a PCIE card with an SSD on it. Also easy, it’s a PCIE SSD and will be fast as blazes. But M.2 sits in the middle and has access to both SATA speed connections and PCIE speed connections.

That can be a bit tricky so be careful. I get it that M.2 is useful for Ultrabooks or Air branded machinery but that’s not the entire market. Then you have the PCIE cards which are super fast but not the most practical in a laptop or small form factor case. In theory then, M.2 is a kind of best of both worlds, but personally I can’t help but feel that the industry is lacking a decent trick here. My motherboard was a pretty pricey MSI X99S XPower AC and only came with a single M.2 slot. Certainly in a machine built around this, I’d like to be able to easily put multiple drives. So after the M.2 I’m then reduced to either SATA or PCIE.

Of course these days, Intel chooses to differentiate its CPU’s with not just core counts and clock speeds but also with… (yup, you guessed it!), number of PCIE lanes! So if you’re a multi-gpu gamer of some ilk and have limited lanes available or no more PCIE slots spare for whatever reason, you’re going to be relegated to plain old SATA. Which means loading screens. Which is probably what you were hoping to avoid by going SSD in the first place.

So there we have the conundrum. Personally, I still like the enclosed drive for several reasons we’ll come to later. I don’t want to really have to use PCIE to get super fast performance out of my SSD. Similarly, as good as M.2 has the potential to be if you get an M.2 PCIE SSD, it still smacks to me of a tactical solution to a strategic problem.

I don’t religiously follow hard drive technology and connections. So perhaps I’m missing some option which is on the horizon but to me it seems like PCIE SSD is the next standard due to the speeds it can achieve and that more and more of these drives are appearing regularly. If this is to become yet another interplay and consideration in balancing a system build out then fine, but it seems a compromise too far for me and I hope we have some new connection/transport technology which will allow us faster speeds than SATA today with multiple drives which doesn’t use PCIE slots or lanes.

The Kingston is an M.2 SATA drive so I can understand the system builder aim. I would have thought most people who want an M.2 in a desktop would opt for a PCIE to get access to the speed in something that is probably safer kept out of a PCIE slot, particularly if you regularly dive into your PC.

Onto the review then.

You can find additional information about our hardware review process and ethics policy here.

Follow Wccftech on Google to get more of our news coverage in your feeds.