Underneath the motherboard? That's strange! I have an M2 SSD on mine and the connector is on top. Fitting the drive was no more difficult than installing a PCIe card. Probably easier than a SATA one actually as only one screw is required, and no cabling.

Yeah, and it wasn't obvious when I was first looking at the manual diagram - I was like "Huh? It can't be there, that's where the SATA cable connects, it wouldn't fit", before realising it was just not well labelled.

Guess it's because Mini-ITX has limited space, and putting it next to the SATA but on the reverse is probably the most efficient layout - a quick search shows other Mini-ITX boards also have it on the back.

Had the connector been more conveniently accessible I probably would have gone for m.2, but SSD will be good enough, and (once I've got it setup) I can remove the 3.5" HDD and will have absolutely no moving parts. Hooray! :D

Mine just sits under my desk upstairs so not usually worried too much about anyone banging it. That's why I have a spinny disk sitting in top on my DVD drive (which is screwed in) and the SSD dangling around the bottom of the case.

Yup. Fucking Dell T_T

I see your point. Under the board is a bit daft and a right sod to reach. Mine however is a normal ATX board, hence the nice, easy access.

Full ATX? Haven't had one in ~7-8 years.

I like a proper tower PC :)

Besides, small ones don't have room for my five hard drives (not counting the SSD)...

Proper full ATX? Or Mid ATX

Oh. I meant the MB.

Does the M.2 drive have any benefit over a normal SSD? Apart from less space as it's directly on the motherboard?

Supposedly faster on PCI-X lane than over SATA.

Standard ATX, same as the standard one in the picture in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX

Chrisss: Potentially, yes. Assuming it's a PCIe/NVMe capable slot, you can get much faster transfer rates, lower seek times etc. SATA is limited to 6Gb/s (600MB/s in other words).

Note that M2 is just a form factor and can run in legacy SATA mode, however it can also support PCIe/NVMe mode which allows for transfer rates of many GB/s. The Samsung 960 Evo drive in my machine for example is specced for up to 3.2GB/s read transfer rate and 1.9GB/s write.

I doubt I get that kind of performance out of it, but the point is that for modern SSDs, SATA is the bottleneck and NVMe/M.2 removes that bottleneck.

Edit: Just ran the Samsung Magician benchmark on my drive. Scores are 2,598 MB/s read and 1,758MB/s write. Certainly a lot more than SATA can deliver...