M.2 interface - have I got the wrong one?

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 17:06

I have run out of free SATA ports in my server, so my plan was to add an M.2 drive and clone the OS onto it, thereby freeing up one of the SATA ports that's currently got a small drive just for Windows.

My motherboard (MSI Z170A SLI PLUS) says it supports the following:
1 x M.2 slot
- Supports PCIe 3.0 x4 standard, 4.2cm/ 6cm/ 8cm length M.2 SSD cards
- Supports PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe Mini-SAS SSD with Turbo U.2 Host Card

I bought a 120GB Kingston A400 M.2 SSD, link here - https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/a400-solid-state-drive?partnum=SA400M8/120G

I assumed that it'd be suitable, yet it refuses to show up when installed.

Now, I think my blunder is that my motherboard supports PCIe M.2 drives and the Kingston I've bought says, "Interface: SATA Rev. 3.0 with backwards compatibility to SATA Rev. 2.0".

Is that why I'm not seeing the drive?

Excuse my ignorance, I've not used M.2 drives before and hadn't appreciated that there were different types.

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 17:17

So if the drive I bought looks like the picture on the left, is that to suggest it isn’t compatible with my mobo?

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 17:39

It doesn’t appear in disk management or BIOS.

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 17:40

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 17:57

I’ve uploaded pics here - https://imgur.com/a/NsRvrUj

Oddly, whilst you can see that the 2 connections are different, the drive fits into the slot fine.

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 17:58

b00merang69 said:
If the one on the left it will be no faster than a 2.5" SATA HD.

Thanks. I’m not worried about speed, more that the bloody thing won’t show it’s face.

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 18:05

b00merang69 said:
It is probably the reason it is not showing up by default because it need to be set to SATA or AHCI mode, if you bought a proper NVME M2 SSD it probably would work and would be far faster also.

The mobo doesn’t appear to support M.2 cards in SATA mode, hence why I’m not seeing it (I think!)

chrismox · 5 Nov 2019 at 18:10

Thanks. I hadn’t realised that there was an improper way to do it, which is why I bought the wrong one!

chrismox · 8 Nov 2019 at 23:31

Thanks. I hadn’t noticed that, but I had decided it was simpler to buy a larger (cheaper) SATA SSD and just partition it, so I’ve ended up avoiding M.2 and, from what you quote, it sounds like I’ve dodged a bullet!