Brand new, unopened in box, we have tested one of these and they work great. An M.2 SSD that has only the M key, as pictured, will be an NVMe SSD. NVMe M.2 SSDs utilize the NVMe protocol that was specifically designed for SSDs. When paired with the PCIe bus, an NVMe SSD offers the latest levels of performance and speed you can get. NVMe SSDs communicate directly with the system CPU using the PCIe sockets. Essentially, it allows flash memory to operate as an SSD directly through the PCIe sockets rather than having to use the SATA communication driver which is a lot slower than NVMe.

NVMe M.2 SSDs are much more performance driven compared to SATA M.2 SSDs. By leveraging the PCIe bus, NVMe M.2 SSDs have theoretical transfer speeds of up to 20Gbps which is already faster compared to SATA M.2 SSDs with 6Gbps. PCIe buses can support 1x, 4x, 8x, and 16x lanes. PCIe 3.0 has an effective transfer speed of up to 985 MB/s per lane which means there is a potential transfer speed of up to 16GB/s. However, there’s only x2 and x4 lanes accessible when using a M.2 form factor with the PCIe bus which translates to a maximum transfer speed of up to 4GB/s. m.2 to USB 3.1

This has both NVME and NGFF keys