How the SSD Upgrade Data Is Built
Where the data comes from
Every verdict is derived from linuxhw/LsPCI, a public corpus of lspci hardware reports contributed by Linux users, licensed CC-BY-4.0. We pin a specific upstream commit (716d5be960) so results are reproducible. This snapshot was generated on 2026-07-15 and covers 6,068 published models out of 16,156 grouped.
We do not scrape drive manufacturers’ compatibility databases. Where we needed to confirm an individual model’s slot count or M.2 length, we read the manufacturer’s own published service manual by hand.
How we decide “NVMe” vs “SATA-only”
Each lspci report lists the PCI devices a machine exposed. An NVMe SSD appears as an NVMe controller on the PCIe bus; a SATA drive sits behind a SATA/AHCI controller. A model is marked NVMe when NVMe controllers appear across its reports, and SATA-only when NVMe was never once observed. The nvmeSharefigure is simply the fraction of a model’s reports that saw an NVMe drive.
Why the PCIe generation is a floor, not a ceiling
For NVMe machines we report the fastest PCIe link we actually observed — say Gen3 ×4. That is the slowestthe slot can be, not the fastest. It is not a limit on what drive you can buy: PCIe is backward compatible, so a Gen4 drive runs fine in a Gen3 slot, just at Gen3 speed. We deliberately never present this number as the slot’s maximum, because doing so would talk people out of drives that work perfectly.
When we refuse to answer
We publish a model only when enough independent reports agree. Where reports contradict each other — usually because one marketing name covers several different hardware configurations — we withhold the answer rather than guess. Recommending an NVMe drive for a machine that only takes SATA is the single easiest way to sell someone a part that cannot fit, so we would rather tell you nothing than tell you something wrong.
What this data does not know
- How many slots are empty. A report shows the installed drive, not the free slot beside it.
- The physical M.2 length the slot accepts. Most laptops use 2280, but some ultrabooks take shorter 2242 or 2230 modules. Where we hand-verified it, we label it “Verified specs”.
- Whether a specific drive is validated for your machine. We answer the interface — NVMe or SATA — not per-part compatibility.
- Coverage is uneven. Reports come from people running Linux, which over-represents business laptops and under-represents consumer lines.
- The upstream corpus is a snapshot. A laptop released after it was captured will not appear.