I have an NVMe drive and an M.2 enclosure. However my drive doesn't easily slot into the enclosure connector like I expected, so I'm wondering if I've bought the wrong enclosure type, or the enclosure is faulty somehow.
Here is a picture of both side by side:
Are these two compatible?
thanks in advance!
Best Answer
Not all M.2 drives are NVMe – cheaper ones are SATA – and the two use different connections – some of the pins on your M.2 connector are for PCI-Express (i.e. NVMe) and some are used for SATA.
M.2 slots on PC mainboards have both connections routed to somewhere since they have both PCI-Express and a SATA controller anyway, but most enclosures only have one or the other.
(Making a SATA-only M.2 enclosure is as cheap as making a generic SATA enclosure, but NVMe (PCI-Express) requires a more complex controller chip; and if the manufacturer tried to do both, then they'd probably have to throw in a USB-hub chip as well, making it a bit more expensive.)
In short, you need to get an M.2 NVMe enclosure.
Many NVMe SSDs do not have the 'B key' notch (are M-key only) so that they could use two additional PCI-Express lanes – which are on pins 12-19, exactly the position that the B-key would cut out.
(But being "physically compatible" would be useless, since the SATA host controller in your enclosure couldn't talk to an NVMe (PCI-Express) device anyway.)