M.2, on the other hand, is actually a type of form factor. You can find both NVMe M.2 SSDs and SATA M.2 SSDs in the wild. Sometimes product advertisements or summaries use “M.2 SSD” to imply ...

Samsung 850 EVO SATA SSD Boot drive Crystal benchmark Seagate Firecuda M.2 NVMe Boot drive Crystal benchmark, over an x4 PCIe 2.0 interface.

The Beetle X31 by SK hynix is a portable SSD that comes in three capacity options: 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB. This largest of them, features read and write speeds reaching 1,000MB/s, provided by ...

The price difference is not always significant; for instance, there may be only approximately a $30 gap between the 500GB Samsung 870 Evo SATA SSD and the 500GB Samsung 970 Evo PCIe M.2 SSD.

While the M.2 form factor is by far the most common — and can still be used with SATA drives — using it with a PCIe SSD will restrict bandwidth to x4 lanes and hinder overall performance.

When I stumbled on the Inland Professional SATA III SSD, it was the 5th best-selling SSD on Amazon. The drive comes in three sizes, and pricing starts at just $24.99 for the 120GB model.

It is fine for spinning disks, as it was designed for, but for any M.2 SSD, the cost difference of going from SATA to NVMe is negligible and the performance benefits are high.

The cheap SSD ultimately finished the test at 13,000 IOPS and 10,225 ms, compared to the Kingston's 78,000 IOPS and 1,630 ms. It was a similar story with 4K random writes.

Below, we’ll go over what NVMe, SATA, and M.2 mean in SSDs, how they compare to each other, and which one you should pick to make sure you’re getting the best SSD.