No reason I can't have two NVMe drives in a PC?

[katie279]

Hi,

Very quick check, have one NVMe drive already in my motherboard and thinking of getting a second and attaching through PCIe adapter - there's no limit or anything on motherboards here?

Have an AB350g motherboard if that matters!

 

[Syore]

The only bottleneck is which PCIe slot you put it in and the chipset (may slow it down) other than that your good to go.

 

[Vince]

Assuming you are on Ryzen 3000 series and the b350 board you have 24 lanes of full speed available to you if you assume 16 for GPU, 4 for the m.2 slot directly to the CPU and 4 lanes out to the PCH (Chipset)

Here is what is offered up by the b350 chipset:



So you effectively push 4 lanes of PCI-e 3 to the chipset and the chipset then burificates those gen 3 lanes into Gen 2 lanes as shown above. Meaning technically the chipset/cpu don't have enough lanes to run 2 nvme at 100% full speed in a b350 board while also running a GPU at 16x. Although honestly I am not sure how hampered an additional drive would be running out of the chipset or if you would end up losing 8 lanes on the GPU and the GPU running at 8x rather than 16x (normally not a massive deal) while the lanes get gobbled up by your M.2 card.

Each board can differ slightly on what it does to juggle the lanes so you can see what your board says in the manual for if you populate another PCI-E slot.

FWIW the second 16 lane on your board is actually pci-e 2.0 x4 from the chipset.