Gadgetory

accessed heralded a strong re-emergence of another storage interface this time it's the you to interface that we saw on gigabytes unreleased Broadwell eat motherboards and this interface has been out for a little bit but it's finally coming to consumer markets on mass this TLDR video recaps the difference between you two and m2 storage devices as quickly as we can with some additional information on SATA Express like where it's gone before that this packed content is brought to you by cyber PowerPC or did readers choice by PC Magazine for gaming desktops first up an extremely abbreviated recap of current chipsets Intel's 100 series chipsets have high-speed i/o lanes that are almost entirely addressable by the motherboard vendor this allows for more differentiation between products and these are called HS io lanes z170 has 26 HS i/o lanes that can be assigned to gb e SATA PCIe or PCIe enabled devices and you - and m dot - are among those PCIe enabled devices but what is u2 u2 is an interface that was originally called s FF 86 39 and it was mostly for server-side use but it has been renamed for the consumer market the u dot to interface connects directly to PCIe lanes on the motherboard and this is as opposed to going through the SATA interface which makes u2 and expansion sort of on SATA Express u dot T's pinout allows the use of for total PCIe lanes and as such its maximum theoretical throughput on Gen 3 is 4 gigabytes per second the u dot 2 pin out resembles the SAS connector if you know those but with way more pins for the lanes on the top of the connector and several the pins are reserved for the ref clock lanes 0 to 3 the SM bus and dual port the remainder of the pins are used for signaling power control and the other ref clock on the motherboard u2 is a double-decker connector that receives a similarly double-decker cable from the SSD on the other end a much wider cable plugs into the SSD for the U dot 2 multi Lane interface with an additional cable for power this is the fastest 2.5 inch SSD interface currently available to consumers but that doesn't mean that the drives are inherently faster more on that Carolee SATA Express meanwhile communicates maximally through two PCIe lanes on the motherboard limiting the interface to two gigabytes per second on gen 3 that's half of you two SATA Express will become a dead end abandoned standard in short order as the industry continues to ignore its existence and moves fully to m dot 2 and u dot two interfaces along with normal PCIe SSD S the SATA Express standard cannot communicate through four PCIe lanes and that is its primary limitation and weakness for reference SATA the normal interface the l-shaped one has a maximum theoretical throughput of 600 megabytes per second which comes down to about 550 per second after the overhead it is accounted for SATA does not utilize PCIe which is a small advantage for anyone maxing out their chipsets laying count but keep in mind that chipset storage lanes are not the same as GPU lanes so even multi-gpu configurations may not conflict with nvme or PCIe SSD is it does depend on your configuration though and it depends on what platform you're using in the future MDOT 2 then is the most comparable to you - it's capable of the same four-lane throughput for storage devices but takes a significantly larger footprint on the motherboard physically and limits users purely by physical space on the board you two interests us because it can be stacked we're current - SATA connectors our PCIe lanes allowing any way and you could theoretically run several 2.5 inch UDOT - SSDs where MDOT - may not allow one quick note on MDOT to interface ports though on motherboards you can actually buy an adapter that adapts them to you - so this is useful if you have m2 slots on the board that you're not using or if you want to use a 2.5 inch SSD rather than an m2 form-factor SSD the reason you might want to do that is because some of the UDOT - SSDs already have faster controllers or NAND on them making them more capable of just pushing a higher throughput through the actual interface and because MDOT - technically supports the same 4 Lane allowance as the U dot 2 interface does adapting it should work just fine for these 2.5 inch SSDs if you prefer those now as for the speed of the SSDs themselves this is just the interface we're talking about so even if your SSD is is hitting the 550 megabyte per second limit of SATA it might not really make use of the UDOT to 4 gigabytes per second throughput allowance maybe it gets a couple more megabytes per second it comes down to the controller and then and used on the SSD and unless your SSD is rated for higher speeds it won't actually make use of these higher speed interfaces but these are important because they allow for higher speed SSDs to be made in the future and moving forward with new controllers and NAND technology so that is all for this quick video hit the patreon link to post all video to helps out directly or check out our other pax content linked in the post role thank you for watching I'll see you all next time