> Also, some of this speed isn't that the SSD components are necessarily that much faster, but rather that they're soldered directly onto the main board and loc

> Also, some of this speed isn't that the SSD components are necessarily that much faster, but rather that they're soldered directly onto the main board and located closely to the components that will use them. Modular, detachable storage located farther from the CPU is just gonna be slower, period. Completely wrong. They're using PCIe 4.0 for the onboard SSD, and PCIe 4.0 for the aftermarket SSD slot. There's no performance penalty for going with removable storage here. We're not talking about a high-speed DRAM interface where shorter traces without the insertion loss of a connector really does help reach higher clock speeds (other things being equal).