What are some decent M.2 SSD speeds?

So I just bought a new laptop from china which has an open M.2 SSD port. Now I want to buy a cheap SSD and use it with but I’m not sure what to get. I’ve always heard that 4k speeds are the most important ones as that the OS uses alot of small files. What are some decent speeds?

Depends on the M.2 port. There are some M.2 ports that can do Sata drives only, or some that can be Pcie drives only, or some that do either. Sata speeds vs Pcie speeds are very different, due to the massive difference in bandwidth available to Pcie drives compared to the relatively tame Sata drives.

Some good sata drives to compare to are:

  • 850 Evo (mid range)
  • Kingston Hyper X Savage (this drive is 2.5 inch only, but sata over cable and sata over M.2 are identical in terms of capability) (high end)

Some good M.2 drives to compare to are:

  • Plextor M8Pe (mid range)
  • Samsung 960 Evo (mid to high end)
  • Samsung 960 Pro (high end)

You can compare whatever drives your looking at to those options. Really before you do that, I would check what kind of M.2 your laptop has. The empty M.2 could be sata, pcie, or even wifi-card only.

Awesome, well this is just a Sata port, so I guess I will look at some benchmarks on 850 evo then! :smiley:

Crucial MX300, WD Blue, SanDisk X400, and ADATA SU800 are decent M.2 SSDs using SATA.

All in all, SSDs have been pretty much maxing out SATA bandwidth for years now, so many modern SSDs will have very little performance difference between models. Not all since there’s always a caveat, but many.