SATA 3.2 or nvme for an SSD?

Jimmy Wilkinson Knife wrote:
Everybody seems to be getting excited about the nvme interface SSDs on
M2 connectors. And everybody says they're so much faster than SATA 3
which is limited to 6Gbps. But it isn't. SATA 3.2 came out years ago
and it's 16Gb/s. So is there any point in buying an M2 shaped SSD? I
can't find any sensible comparisons online anywhere.


There were no devices available when this article was written.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/7843/...ss-with-asus/5

The pinout is effectively two lanes. The four mystery pins seem
mainly so that a device that has the whole set of pins (a purpose-built
SATA Express) would trigger the right "mode" in the motherboard+driver.

GND
TX1+
TX1-
GND
RX1-
RX1+
GND

GND
TX2+
TX2-
GND
RX2-
RX2+
GND

Floating
Device_Reset
GND
Detection

An M.2 with four lanes, so this should be "twice as good" as
the previous idea.

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/t...cie-x4-pinout/

As for the SFF connector, my eyes begin to glaze over when there
are too many of these damn things.

I'm only really "attracted" to items that I can buy, and things I
see ona regular basis. If it has a goofy connector, it'll take me
all day to dig up info on it.

This was a bad enough exercise, in that practically nobody
was willing to give out the above pinouts. There were motherboard
manuals that decided not to document it, like it was a form
of "poison" or something. Some of the standards specs cost
$2K to $4K, and who knows what NDA terms are "listed on page 2"
of such expensive pieces of crap. So the dude on the NVidia
site above, was trying to build a PCB using scavenged info
without "paying the fee". And at least we can see the four lanes
in the diagram.

HTH,
Paul