Hacker News Reader

M.2 wouldn't be a bottleneck. It supports up to PCIe 3.0 x4 which has a maximum bandwidth of 4 GBps in each direction.

NVMe specifically, as M.2 is just the connector (which can also use the slower SATA interface) rather than the interface.

Actually PCIe specifically. NVMe improves performance slightly, but it's mostly all due to PCIe.

I have a non-NVMe Samsung AHCI M.2 SSD from 2014 that gives me ~2.3GB/s sequential reads and ~1.2GB/s sequential writes, no NVMe required.