M.2 (a.k.a. Next Generation Form Factor / NGFF) is form factor for SSDs that is popular in new laptops and tablets thanks to its small dimensions and weight. M.2 SSDs have three possible interfaces (which use may depend on the type of M.2 storage device, host machine capabilities and operating system support):
- Legacy SATA: these behave as SATA SSDs, they use the AHCI driver (~400 MB/s for read/write operations). Blancco Drive Eraser displays them as SATA/SSD drives (in the interface and report).
- PCI Express using AHCI: these drives have a PCI Express interface but use the AHCI driver for backwards compatibility (~400MB/s for read/write operations). Blancco Drive Eraser displays them as SATA/SSD drives (in the interface and report).
- PCI Express using NVMe: these drives have a PCI Express interface and use the NVMe driver, achieving high-performance thanks to its extended parallelism (~1GB/s per PCIe lane for read/write operations). Blancco Drive Eraser displays them as NVMe drives (in the interface and report).
Blancco Drive Eraser can detect and erase M.2 SSDs since version 6.1.0 (overwriting and - if supported by - firmware erasure).