In the world of NVMe drives, everyone knows what an M.2 SSD is these days. However, U.2 drives are a little bit less known, but they're even faster than M.2 drives. There are some downsides like higher power consumption, but aside from that, they're better in a lot of different ways.

3 Better heat management

Larger surface area

M.2 drives don't typically have heat management problems, though this is changing slightly when it comes to PCIe 5.0. Those drives run hot and fast, and can thermally throttle as a result of that. While U.2 drives are incredibly fast too, they're larger and therefore, can better dissipate heat across a bigger surface.

Is this one of the biggest advantages of U.2 drives? Absolutely not, but it's certainly an advantage. They often come with integrated heatsinks too, which certainly helps keep them keep cool and run at their max speeds.

2 Higher capacity options

M.2 drives are limited by space

M.2 drives typically cap out at 8TB of storage, and that's really because of a physical limitation in storage space. While I'm sure there will be advancements in this area in the future to get more storage out of them, 8TB Is going to be hard to overcome. In contrast, U.2 drives can go up to just shy of 31TB, a pretty big increase.

Naturally, a big part of this advantage is the physical size of a U.2 drive when compared to an M.2 drive, and it's not as simple as U.2 drives taking up the same level of space as an M.2 can. In fact, they can be significantly bigger, and to put them in a consumer PC requires an adapter that connects to a PCIe slot in most cases.

1 Much higher endurance

Partially because of their enterprise uses

Many SSDs measure their endurance in terms of Drive Writes Per Day, or DWPD. This basically measures how many times you can write the entire size of the drive to the drive, and it's typically over a five year span. For example, the Samsung 990 Evo 1TB has a DWPD of 0.3.

While it may sound like a lot to write 300GB of data every single day to your SSD for five years, U.2 drives increase this significantly. The Kingston SEDC1000M 7.68TB U2 drive has a DWPD of 1 over five years, meaning you can write 8TB to it, every single day, for five years and it will be expected to last.

Of course, U.2 drives are typically aimed at enterprise, which is partially why they manage to pull off some incredible endurance figures. The Micron 5100 Pro 2TB, an M.2 drive aimed at businesses, has a DWPD of 2.5, so it's still an impressive 5TB of writing a day for five years.