Upgrade SSD to PCIe 4.0  

Crilley said:

When browsing for a new laptop I noticed some of Dell's newer laptops have the PCIe 4.0 ssd's and some of them have the PCIe 3.0's. Now I want to know if something like the Gigabyte Aorus (AORUS NVMe Gen4 SSD 1TB | Solid State Drive (SSD) - GIGABYTE Global) would be a possible upgrade for inside a laptop and if it would be compatible with the motherboards of the laptops which are still sold with PCIe 3.0's.
The laptop series I'm talking about is the Dell XPS 15 7590 (https://www.dell.com/nl-nl/shop/beki...15-7590-laptop).
I'm sorry the site is in dutch but I'm unsure if some configurations or models are different on the non-dutch website.

M.2 (PCIe x4/NVME) v4 are downward compatible with v3.0 but wouldn't get speed higher than with v3.

@Crilley -

Welcome to Windows Ten Forums!

You can't just drop in a PCI 4.x component and expect everything to run faster - it's a motherboard/component relationship.
Like @CountMike said above the SSD will only work at the highest bus speed that the architecture will allow.
However, if you decide to upgrade your motherboard, that SSD will be "future-proofed."

This is different than PCI lanes., i.e. x2, x4, etc.

Here's a good read:

What Is PCIe 4.0 and Should You Upgrade?

Short version: at this time, to support PCI-E 4.0, you'd need an AMD Ryzen Gen 3 CPU and an X570 motherboard. You have neither.

PCI-E 4.0 is backwards compatible with a PCI-E 3.0 system. You just wouldn't see the performance improvement.

I'm not sure when Intel will embrace PCI-E 4.0, if ever.

I'm not sure that you'd see any real-world performance improvement (outside of benchmarks) with a PCI-E 4.0 SSD. I have one, in my primary system. It wasn't life altering.

The main argument against buying one is that PCI-E 4.0 SSDs may be significantly more expensive than PCI-E 3.0 ones. You may want to invest in one of the faster 3.0 drives instead (TLC rather than QLC, for example).

Rather than looking at the main quoted speed which is the sustained write/ read speeds look at things like random read/ write speeds, access times and cache, because unless you are working with huge file transfers most of the time Windows, most apps and even games tend to work with smaller chunks and since an NVME drive is designed to fragment files (wear levelling) the random figures and cache will play a much more important part in day to day use and is where you will experience the best performance. So maybe as posted above, don't rush to get an expensive 4.0 drive if you could get a cheaper or better performing 3.0 drive depending on your use case, you would always have the option to upgrade when there are more 4.0 drives to choose from and the prices come down a bit.
Just my opinion.