How to add additional M2 drive

[Trunkey]

So my PC is getting a little old but its still plenty powerful enough running games at max settings at 1440 due to the 3090FE and the 6950x CPU but I am running out of M2 space and my EVGA X99 Micro 2 mobo only has one slot.
So what's the best easiest thing to do?
Clone my 512GB C drive onto a 2 or 4 TB drive and carry on? (How easy is this in reality)
Try to fit a PCIe expansion card with M2 slots on it? (this will need alterations to the water loop and would I still get the full M2 performance?)
Find an X99 board with more than one M2 slot (Hard to do)
Or go for a new mobo & cpu which is expensive and my least favourite option.
Opinions and thoughts invited!

 

[chroniclard]

Cloning is fairly easy, I have done it recently using the free macrium reflect software. Went from 250gb m2 to a 1 TB.

Although I have 2 slots, so might be harder/ not sure how it would work with 1.......assume it would have to clone to some other drive, then write back.....

 

[Armageus]

If you have a big enough sata hard drive that can hold an image of your C drive, then you make a bootable Macrium Reflect USB drive, boot from that and create an image file of your current NVMe (store it on the hard drive). You then swap the new NVMe drive over, again boot from the Macrium Reflect USB drive and restore the image file to your new NVMe.


Rather than a PCIe NVMe adapter, you can also get USB->NVMe enclosures so in theory (*I haven't personally tried) you could use one of those for the new drive, clone it across (again using Macrium Reflect), then shutdown and swap the new drive into the motherboard slot. You could then retain the old drive as a "super fast flash drive" using the enclosure.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x Silverstone MS11C External M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD Enclosure, USB 3.1 Type C= £39.95

Total: £42.69 (includes shipping: £2.74)
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