MSI Z690 Tomahawk and NVME/HDD Inquiry

[alphaomega16]

I have been regretting my decision to buy a 1TB NVME drive by itself and I have before gotten a smaller drive (250GB) for the OS and main programs and the 1TB as a separate entity but I did so out of fear of not being able to use 4 mechanical drives in the machine due to past motherboards cutting off ports if you used a linked nvme slot.

I have been through the manual but see nothing to indicate that any of the SATA ports or anything else will be effected by using two of the nvme slots.

ofc this is the first time I will ever be using an nvme drive but if anybody else more knowledgeable wouldn't mind double checking the manual or if anybody else has first hand experience I would appreciate it greatly if you could clear any fears I have of being able to use a smaller 250 drive then the 1TB one for games.


Apologies if I have been a bit of a pain over the last few days around the forums with questions but I am just a worry wart.

 

[Vimes]

I asked something similar over at the MSI forums as I have one of their 690 boards. My pervious Z390 Master would share lanes etc and disable certain SATA ports as the M2 ports were used, it had three.

I was told that I could use all four M2 ports on my board and have no issues of any restrictions to other devices on this chipset / motherboard.
At the moment I use two NVME drives and two SSD's

 

[alphaomega16]

I asked something similar over at the MSI forums as I have one of their 690 boards. My pervious Z390 Master would share lanes etc and disable certain SATA ports as the M2 ports were used, it had three.

I was told that I could use all four M2 ports on my board and have no issues of any restrictions to other devices on this chipset / motherboard.
At the moment I use two NVME drives and two SSD's

That is fantastic news, I might pick up a smaller 250 OS drive then for the cpu lane, I am doing a lot of room spring cleaning and moving stuff around (Its years overdue but new build got me motivated to sort my shame of a room out before I build lol) so I am reserving the weekend to do this.

Going to initially just go gpuless just to make sure it gets up and running and I have no hiccups or whatnot for a couple of weeks then if I don't have an FE card paid for and on its way by end of year ill resort to stealing 1080 from current PC and hoping my old 670 still works lol.

onboard gpu should be fine for roundabout stuff and some testing, due to the crappy OS being tied to system thing ill wait to pay for windows 10 license.

Edit
My current system is 3570k i5 with 8gb memory, going to a 12700 with 32gb

Hoping that the new system is as solid as this one has been, had been hoping to do an all brand new build but with the state of the whole GPU situation my dreams have been dashed lol

 

[Vimes]

@alphaomega16 The best of luck with your build. I used to use a 250GB NVME drives for my OS but found it very tight in terms of space. That was with just Windows, Office and then a few utilities. Even My Documents is on another drive. At 500GB or so you just have more space and assurance that you should still have spare room for quite a while.

I didn't need any of the features of the Tomahawk board so I saved money and just bought the 690 A Pro with no WiFi. At just under £190 it worked out fine.