Better to use 2 NVME drives or 1NVME and 1SATA SSD?

[Andr3w]

Getting a gigabyte b650 board https://www.overclockers.co.uk/giga...ocket-am5-ddr5-atx-motherboard-mb-5bf-gi.html

I’ll be moving over my current 1TB NVME drive (approx 4 years old working fine). I’m going to get another drive for game/media storage.

Is it better to have 2 NVME drives straight into the motherboard or just use the 1 NVME and get a standard SATA/SSD drive such as this https://www.overclockers.co.uk/sams...er-3d-v-nand-solid-state-drive-hd-243-sa.html

Thanks

 

[Andr3w]

Use 2 NVME. OCUK's summary of the board is wrong, it has three (not 2) M.2 slots which is confirmed in the longer description.

If you do buy SATA, don't get the QVO since it uses QLC with poor performance & endurance (& I wouldn't get the EVO either, because it is unreliable).

Ah cool I’m happy to use 2XNVME then. I’d seen online that using more than 1 can cause issues with the GPU or PCIe slots, something to do with how many channels they take up. Is that a legacy thing?

 

[Andr3w]

It depends on the board, but technically it is feasible for Zen 4 to use 8 lanes (2x M.2) from the CPU without any impact on the board lanes whatsoever. The B650 Gaming X uses all 8 CPU lanes and 4 chipset lanes.

That means absolutely nothing to me , but i'm going to hazard a guess that 'it doesn't matter on this board' is what I need to take away?

 

[Andr3w]

PCI-Express is divided into lanes, your graphics card uses a slot that has 16 lanes, for example.

The CPU has a fixed number of lanes available, so does the chipset.

Every slot (including M.2) has to get those lanes from either the CPU, or the chipset.

Intel 13th gen CPU:
16x PCI-E 5.0 (Graphics)
4x PCI-E 4.0 (any other use)

Z790 Chipset:
0x PCI-E 5.0

So, any Z790 board with PCI-E 5.0 M.2 slot loses lanes from the graphics card (it actually always loses 8, because the CPU can only split the graphics card into 8 and 8, not 12 and 4).

AMD Zen 4 (7000) CPU:
16x PCI-E 5.0 (Graphics)
8x PCI-E 5.0 (any other use)

So, AMD boards lose nothing if they use the CPU's 8 spare lanes (PCI-E 5.0 can be repurposed into PCI-E 4.0, which is what the B650 Gaming X does).

That's great thanks for explaining it to me, I understand now

I'll go ahead with another (new) 1tb NVME drive that I will use as my boot/game drive, then use my current older one as just media etc.