I’ve got a Supermicro X11SSV motherboard with an mPCIE slot, and I’ve got a Lenovo Chromebook motherboard with an M.2 wifi card slot. Ideally I’d like to add 2 more sata ports to the Supermicro board, and I’d like to use a aliexpress M.2 to RJ45 adapter on the Chromebook. The problem is I can’t find consistent information on the speeds of these ports. It doesn’t say in either of the manuals, and from googling it seems that m.2 slots sometimes do PCIE x1 and sometimes USB 2.0, and that mPCIE is just another name for mSATA.
Does anyone have any info on how to determine what kind of speeds the ports do? Or how to determine it on a case by case basis? Thanks.
No, mSATA looks like m.2 but is functionally different, using SATA data not PCIe.
If you’re using some m.2 to RJ45 adapter, I’m guessing you’re limited to the 1Gbs RJ45 bandwidth regardless of the card’s technology, unless your Ethernet is 2.5Gb or something faster.
Even if your m.2 PCIe devices support greater speeds, the adapter itself might have “USB 2.0-like” throughput.
Best bet it you’re looking to add PCIe devices to a supermicro motherboard, buy a m.2 PCIe expansion card to achieve this so you can natively utilize PCIe lanes for the best bandwidth whether it’s WiFi, storage, etc.
Edit: I realize you said additional sata ports which they have PCIe SATA expansion boards too.
The easiest way to be sure might be to check it yourself.
If Linux is already installed on these machines, run Hardinfo2. It will tell you specifically how many lanes each slot has. It should also report back on lots of hardware capabilities.
If drives are installed, you can benchmark them yourself.
I’d like to use a aliexpress M.2 to RJ45 adapter on the Chromebook.
Make sure it is of the right kind. M.2 Wi-Fi slots are key E, M.2 SSD slots are key M (mostly) and cards made for 1 kind does not fit the other.
If the slot is for Wi-Fi it should have PCIe as that is what most Wi-Fi modules connect to. USB is used for Bluetooth mostly.
M.2 is just a connector standard. Depending on the motherboard and the type of m.2 (like type E or type M), different signals can be routed to that connector/slot: SATA, pcie, even USB! Probably more things I don’t know about.
mSATA is an old standard which basically is totally unused today. SATA over m.2 is a newer standard which seems wine l some usage.
I don’t know about mPCIE but it also sounds like an older standard than pcie over m.2, and probably not compatible.
I work in IT and when I want to find out what something has, I literally pull up the manual page for the motherboard. It tells you what it is. Sometimes a specifications page for a part is good enough. LLMs like perplexity can get you search results where you can then read for yourself what the actual thing does…
Supermicro X11SSV is probably not a motherboard, I see X11SSV-Q, X11SSV-Q-O, and other variants
The lenovo chromebook should have a specific model too. Search for that.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters PCIe Peripheral Component Interconnect Express SATA Serial AT Attachment interface for mass storage SSD Solid State Drive mass storage
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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