Now that the new SSD is in place, you need to reinstall Windows 11. It is recommended to have Surface Pro 8 plugged in for AC power during this process (don't power it on yet until step 2 below): We actually like these because often, you often get a robust heat sink on the M.2 drive. Some PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs can run hot under sustained read/write tasks and throttle their speed. That said, unless you're running a server or something similar, where a drive is constantly getting hammered with reads and writes, that's usually not something you have to worry about. That's because many of these drives are so fast, they get their transfer duties done before they have a chance to get all that hot. For this tutorial, I will re-use the metal sleeve and re-paste the thermal compound. Making a Windows 11 Recovery Drive South Korean memory-chip maker SK Hynix is a relative newcomer to the consumer solid-state drive market, but you would never know that based on its first offerings. The SK Hynix Platinum P41, a PCI Express 4.0 NVMe M.2 SSD, is its best yet. It dominated our PCMark 10 and 3DMark Storage benchmark testing, setting several new records in the process. The P41 supports 256-bit AES hardware-based encryption. SK Hynix provides a clone utility tool, the SK Hynix System Migration Utility, for its SSDs, in addition to Easy Drive Manager software, which lets you see detailed information on drive health, run diagnostics, and erase the drive. And the P41 can be had for a very reasonable price in its 1TB and 2TB capacities. Who It's For Burek, John (14 April 2015). "2015 Guide: The Best M.2 Solid-State Drives". Computer Shopper . Retrieved 15 July 2015.

Computer bus interfaces provided through the M.2 connector are PCI Expressx4 (up to four lanes), Serial ATA3.0, and USB3.0 (a single logical port for each of the latter two). It is up to the manufacturer of the M.2 host or module to select which interfaces are to be supported, depending on the desired level of host support and the module type. Different M.2 connector keying notches denote various purposes and capabilities of both the M.2 hosts and modules, and also prevent the M.2 modules from being inserted into incompatible host connectors. [2] [3] [5] Take your large game library wherever you are with up to 2TB 1 of trusted Western Digital TLC NAND storage. The market has settled on 22mm wide as the standard for desktop and laptop implementations; the aftermarket drives available and the accessible slots we've seen have all been that width. The most common lengths we've seen are 80mm ("Type-2280") and 60mm ("Type-2260"). The lengthier the drive, the more NAND chips you can tend to stuff on it (plus, M.2 drives can be single- or double-sided), though know that length isn't an absolute measure of capacity. 42mm, 60mm, and 80mm M.2 SSDs (Credit: Intel) So an M.2 SSD can be SATA-based, PCIe-based with NVMe support, or PCIe-based without NVMe support. An M.2 SSD with NVMe support offers up to five times more bandwidth than SATA M.2 models, bringing better performance in key tasks, such as file transfers, video or photo editing, transcoding, compression and decompression. One last caveat to drop in before we get to our product recommendations surrounds Intel's SSD line. Intel for a while sold a family of M.2-based storage products under the brand name Optane, in two very distinct types of drive. Intel's "Optane SSDs" were SSDs like any other, bootable drives that can serve as a stand-alone boot drive or as secondary storage. They were discontinued for consumers in 2021, but you may still see them around. (Intel sold its SSD business at the end of 2021 to SK Hynix, which spun it off into a new subsidiary, Solidigm.)

Crucial T700

For example, M.2 modules with two notches in B and M positions use up to two PCI Express lanes and provide broader compatibility at the same time, while the M.2 modules with only one notch in the M position use up to four PCI Express lanes; both examples may also provide SATA storage devices. Similar keying applies to M.2 modules that utilize provided USB3.0 connectivity. [5] [11] [22] Note: All M.2 2230 SSDs are single-sided which means they are on the slimmer side. Single-sided SSDs have NAND memory chips and controller located on one side only, leaving the other side free from any components. Also, the performance of a same-capacity 2230 SSD is comparatively lower than its similar 2280 counterpart. Right now, the maximum storage capacity available for M.2 2230 SSD is 2TB. Best M.2 2230 Solid State Drives (NVMe SSDs) The ADATA XPG Spectrix S40 is an unapologetically bright RGB-lit PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD that blings up your PC. Its 4K read and write speeds should keep most gamers happy, too. The ADATA XPG Spectrix S40G carries some respectable wins out of its duel with other competing drives we've tested, and it looked great doing it. The Crucial T500 is for users willing to pay a little extra to get the best PCI Express 4.0 SSD performance. At a time when many low-priced DRAM-less SSDs are hitting the market, the T500 has a full DRAM cache (as well as a top-shelf Phison controller and 232-layer TLC NAND flash), which could give it an advantage in sustained large-file transfers, as well as in use with the PS5. Get ready for an immersive experience with exclusive gaming features including PCIe ® Gen 4.0 3, Western Digital's nCache™ 4.0 Technology, and Microsoft’s DirectStorage Support.

A typical 1TB SSD usually has 952GB of available storage with around 913GB available after Windows 11 is installed versus the 823GB you'll have (with Windows 11) in one of these Western Digital drives. That's a loss of about 90GB. We mentioned NVMe above. NVMe is another technical hurdle to consider, because systems and motherboards need board-level support for these drives to be bootable. All late-model motherboards now support NVMe M.2 drives, but older boards are not guaranteed to support booting from an NVMe-based drive. Outside of new motherboards, these high-bandwidth, NVMe-capable slots are also found in some recent laptops. Also note that in some cases, a laptop may support a PCI Express NVMe drive, but it may be soldered to the motherboard and thus not upgradable. So, if you're thinking of upgrading a recent laptop or convertible, be sure to consult your manual very closely before buying one of these drives. (Credit: Zlata Ivleva)Early examples of the latest generation of M.2 drives, using the PCI Express 5.0 bus, also come in the Type-2280 format, but it's expected that some PCIe 5.0 slots on new motherboards will be built to support the larger Type-25110 format (25mm by 110mm), so we may well see PCIe 5.0 SSDs with these dimensions as well. PCIe 5 drives are capable of tremendous throughput speeds (in excess of 10,000MBps) that should generate abundant heat, and the SSDs we have seen so far come with substantial built-in heatsinks. The M.2 specification provides up to four PCI Express lanes and one logical SATA3.0 (6Gbit/s) port, and exposes them through the same connector so both PCI Express and SATA storage devices may exist in the form of M.2 modules. Exposed PCI Express lanes provide a pure PCI Express connection between the host and storage device, with no additional layers of bus abstraction. [9] PCI-SIG M.2 specification, in its revision 1.0 as of December2013 [update], provides detailed M.2 specifications. [2] :12 [10] Storage interfaces [ edit ] Know which bus you're on. In a laptop-upgrade scenario, you're almost certainly swapping out one M.2 drive for another, with the intent of gaining capacity. Make sure you know the specifications of the drive coming out of your system—and whether it's reliant on the SATA or PCI Express bus—so you can install the same, presumably roomier kind going in.