I'm looking at getting a new SSD for my computer.
I currently have an unused M2 slot on my motherboard, which...has me curious about getting one of these.
Doth anyone know, are these things like hard drives where basically any hard drive plugs into any motherboard or are they more akin to ram where I'll have to choose carefully and there's different numbers to be aware of?
AFAIK, they're just like hard drives. I have two different ones in my PC, there is no issue.
M2 SSDs are just SSDs designed the way they were always supposed to be designed. The HD-like casing and SATA connector were just a concession to the need for backwards compatibility. They're faster than SATA-connected SSDs and physically more fragile (thus the cover for them), but otherwise no different.
I've installed 2 now with no issues. Shouldn't be finicky like RAM can be. They don't seem any faster to me than the SATA ones I had, but they score way higher on benchmark tests so I guess they must be.
I have one. My computer does boot in seconds. Beyond that I can't say. Though it probably does use less power than spinning disks.
One day I'll need to replace my Synology's drives with SSDs.
All this time, 6 years or so, my motherboard supported them and I didn't know they existed...
Bought and installed one now. Maybe noting slight performance improvements with some software? Hard to say... needed more internal hd space anyway.
We've been dropping nvmes into every Dell that can take it (a surprising number of them) to deal with the W10 and W11 21H2+ slowdowns with spinning drivres. They're great, and they're not all that pricey these days. They and the older msatas make really good externals too. Just pop them into an enclosure.
I've got 1 2TB nvme and 2x 2TB SATA SSDs in my personal machine that hasnt seen an HDD in...a decade (?) though, and the difference isn't quite as noticeable in a situation like that. It's there, but it's not like the SATA SSDs are super slow. It's my boot and MSFS drive.