I've never installed Windows 10 on an M.2 drive. Is there anything different I should know about going in? Thank you!
Nothing about M.2 is any different than any other drive as far as Windows 10 is concerned. Both the SATA emulation and native NVMe M.2 drives are fully supported and just work with built-in drivers.
I'm not sure if any of the others actually tried installing Win 10 on an NVME drive For it to work, you need to have these 3 requirements... 1. A bios that has NVME instructions 2. The OS---namely Win 10 3. The drivers I had trouble with my Samsung NVME 512gb drive... Win 10 wasn't detecting the drive for installation, even after adding the drivers... Everything was solved when I manually added the drivers into the iso...to be specific, the boot, recovery and install wims... There are many tools that can do it, if you ever land up in a similar situation... I used NTLite, for it's ease of use
You pretty much need 100 Series chipset & above. I've performed quite a few downgrades of notebooks to Win7 & many have worked. Most can install the OS but have some other issue. ie, Randomly long OS bootup time, unable to successfully wake from sleep.. etc.. For those that are going to build their PC with PCIe SSD's should also be aware that not all Sata ports will be available when these drives are used. Always check the detailed specs!
They are thinner based on their physical sizes but some are longer than the typical mSata. I made a comparison with the mSata in my Acer Aspire S7 with m.2 22110 in a Friend's laptop and there is no different in speed despite the information on how faster they are for being the next generation form factor.
You're mixing "railways" with "trains", if you place a slow train on an high speed line, it will run at the same slow speed it reached on old school lines
The ports for m.2 SSD are actually different from the mSata. In that case it is not going to fit for my system. I compare my computer with a friend's having m.2 and there is no noticeable different in speed. At a point mine even boot faster.
A SATA SSD can't be faster than that the maximum transfer rata allowed by the SATA protocol, no matter how good its controller is, no matter how fast their flash chips are. instead a M2 drive can be slower than the maximum transfer rate allowed by the M2 protocol. A cheap and slow M2 will be a cheap and slow M2 no matter how fast its connection is. Seems pretty simple to me.
Typically, the m.2 transfer rate is said to be higher and in some cases hitting 2GBps(2000MB/s). My friend used to brag about it a lot and I am so glad we finally put it to rest after the comparison test(not a technical test though).
WOW what a great discovery! Did you ever read that a sata III connection can't pass 600MB/s (theoretically, practically the number is smaller) So does really matter if your reading tells 2300 or 2500? It's still 400/500% of the maximum SATAIII value. No need to involve conspiracy theories here.