Looking for M.2 Drive.

Digital X

Digital X

Digital X

Soldato
Joined
25 May 2013
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Kent.
I have an ASUS Prime X470 Pro currently with a 120GB Samsung EVO SSD and 2TB Mechanical Drive.

I plan to go purely M.2 so there's less cables, noise etc.

Looking at the info on my Motherboard there is an M.2 Slot and M.2 Heatsink. Both in seperate spaces on the board. Can I fit 2 on here or just 1?

Not sure it would be best having a small boot and drive and large game drive, or one 2TB drive for everything.
 
No sense to waste limited space for tiny drives.
Partitioning is for keeping things separate in case of needing to do clean install of OS.

Adata SX8200 Pro is the best priced full PCIe v3 speed 2TB drive.
Black-Blue Sabrent Rocket would be another good.
Those would be good for primary M.2 slot.
Though not that it would speed up game loading times much from SATA SSD...


Second slot shares PCIe lanes with PCIe x1_1 and PCIe x1_3 slots and supports only SATA if either of those is used.
And anyway because of chipset's limitations that secondary M.2 slot is only x2 slot.
Hence budget drives like Kingston A2000/WD Blue SN550 would be good/enough for it. (both series limited to 1TB max)
Or in case of those PCIe x1 slots in use then WD Blue 3D would be sensible SATA drive for the slot.

Alternately could use adapter for M.2 in PCIe x16_3.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/akasa-m.2-ssd-to-pcie-adapter-card-cc-008-ak.html
Which shares two of its lanes with those afore mentioned PCIe x1 slots.
Or technically it should be possible to have PCIe x2 speed drives in both secondary M.2 and that slot assuming you can force PCIe x16_3 to x2 mode in BIOS keeping other two lanes free.
 
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