Question m.2 SSD Generation Types

mrcanada11

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Oct 31, 2019
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Question for the masses - I have a 2015 Alienware 15 laptop, the one that was Windows 8 but since has been upgraded to Win10. When I bought it, they had removed the SSD boot drive and loaded everything over onto the HDD. Needless to say, Windows AND needing to access the drive easily overloads the disk, which can take a LONG time to finally boot up and start performing.

I'm looking to get the SSD back inside and put Windows over onto it, so it'll be the boot drive and system drive, while all the files are on the HDD for storage. I've been looking for a bit, but I can't find it anywhere.

In short - what generation is my m.2 SSD slot? There are two of them, one that's PCIe x4, and one that's x2. I'm only going to use the x4 slot, but I didn't want to buy a Gen 4 SSD if the computer is only Gen 2 - the new SSD wouldn't perform to its potential. And it would be more expensive than an older SSD that would still work just fine in a slightly older computer.
 
Guaranteed your M.2 slot(s) are not PCIe4.0. That launched first on AMDs X570 chipset in 2019.

Since it's a laptop, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that it's being run at PCIe2.0 speeds. But you might as well buy a PCIe3.0 (x4) SSD since they're most common and backward compatible anyway.
 
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