Run a computer from an m.2 ssd?

Hi, can you run a computer with just an m.2 ssd without anything in the regular hdd bay? Are tthere any draw backs or advantages?

 

Yes you can.

Advantage;

• computer will weigh a few grams less.
• potentially higher performance than a SATA3 (2.5") SSD
  • if using the NVMe x2 or x4 interface
  • more likely on a desktop platform because of higher cooling capacity of the platform

Disadvantages;

• Low capacity vs. available 2.5" SSD's.
• potentially lower performance than a SATA3 (2.5") SSD
  • if using the SATA interface
  • lower, low QD (less than QD8) performance vs. 2.5" drives
• Much higher heat produced and if not properly vented which will result in throttling of the storage subsystem and also other components too, depending on the chassis and cooling design of the notebook in question.
• potentially higher cost than 2.5" drives of equal capacity and performance
• low selection of drives, capacity and manufacturers to buy from

But the question is, why would you?

In my opinion, M.2 drives are a stillborn technology and will be obsolete before the next gen of notebooks worth buying will be available to buy (even if they have M.2 slots on them... there will be something much better for storage subsystems by then for both performance, capacity and price).

Hope this helps.

 

yes my hdd died in my laptop within 2 months and i was just m2 ssds for a while.

eventually i bought a 2.5 1 tb ssd also on top of the 3 m2 ssds i had.

For that matter my computer uses the 2.5 inch bay drive for storage whether it's an hdd or ssd it's run on 2 m2 ssd since new

 

It's like any other drive, you can run with M.2, mSATA, SATA...

 

Yes, it works perfectly fine, it's basically what I am using at the moment. One thing though, if you put in a NVMe drive in your laptop and decide to reinstall windows, if you do it under UEFI, you'll likely have to load the driver for the NVMe drive manually during the installation process. I had a lot of "fun" installing Windows 10 under GPT partitioning with UEFI enabled on a NVMe drive recently.