How Good is an M.2 Card on a System?

[oathmark1]

What I want to believe is I can upgrade any mobo with an m.2 card in the PCI-E slot, and suddenly it's a nice performer, but....
....not going to happen I assume.

 

[Paul NZ]

The BIOS may have to support NVME if you use a PCI-E slot

 

[Dunlop0078]

What motherboard? What M.2 drive?

That depends on what you mean by performance and if you already have an SSD in your system. If you already have a SATA SSD it would make little to no difference unless you do a lot of large file transfers. If you are using a hard drive I would suggest a cheaper SATA SSD, it will improve boot times if widows is on the drive as well as make any programs on the SSD launch much faster, it will make the system feel overall more responsive. However it wont improve framerate in games if that's what your looking for.

If you have a motherboard with no M.2 slot and it is older, you may be able to use a pcie adapter however you would likely be limited to only PCIE 2.0 speeds and 2 lanes. Which would limit the performance of say a samsung 960 evo which can take advantage of PCIE 3.0 speeds and 4 lanes.

 

[oathmark1]

Okay, so what you are saying is that unless your board is m.2 compatible, then you can't upgrade for any improvement with any m.2 card?

I don't really care what holes the m.2 upgrade uses or even if it is m.2 or optane. What I'm looking for is a way to upgrade an old board other than with SSD or in addition to SSD.

I've watch those tech quicky vids by Linus, and he talks about the m.2 card that will add more speed SSD and HDD and optane that will substitute the m.2 and SSD in order to add more speed to HDD.

Does anyone have any real experience with this?

 

[drajitsh]

the quantum of improvement of PCIe/NVMe drives over a decent SATA drives with much less than the improvement of SSD over HDD. the perceptible difference in normal client workloads is even less.