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I've bought an M.2 SSD drive and a PCIe adapter. I've installed them in an existing system, but I can't see how to make the new drive visible. The MB is a Gigabyte GA-H16M-S2PV. Do I need to find some sort of driver?
Soldato
What drive did you buy? Is it NVMe? M.2 SATA drives are, well, SATA and so use a different protocol to PCIe
Ah - I don't know. It's:
WD Blue WDS250G2B0B-00YS70
I don't see "NVMe" anywhere. Is it usable?
Would an NVMe drive have the same physical format?
WD Blue WDS250G2B0B-00YS70
I don't see "NVMe" anywhere. Is it usable?
Would an NVMe drive have the same physical format?
Soldato
Same physical format, same.slot bit different keying. It looks like a SATA M.2 drive would fit on an NVMe compatible slot but not vice versa:
I believe some adapters can manage SATA drives but I'd say generally they don't - NVMe is a PCIe interface already whereas SATA isn't.
That WD Blue is a SATA drive, I'm sad to say.
Thanks - I had missed the detail that there are two "almost the same" formats. I can't use this one in any of my systems at the moment. The reason I bought the adapter was that I don't have an M.2 socket.
Soldato
In the short term, you can get adapters that turn M.SATA or M.2 into a normal 2.5" SATA drive. Usually about £5-7, so not too painful on the wallet if you don't want to return the drive
This way you can reuse the drive in any future machines.
Thanks again. I've ordered an M.2 to SATA adapter. With this I can use the SSD as there is a spare bay, so all I lose is an unnecessary adapter.
Soldato
No worries, glad it's sorted