I'm going for a M2 drive only system to get away from all the wiring. I've just spent half a day clearing out my 1TB storage HDD and gotten it down to just under 300gb. I have a CT1000P1SSD8 1TB M2 SSD as my windows and main drive and I have a Crucial 500GB P5 M2 to go in for storage, I'm also going to purchase another 1TB M2 solely for games. The question I have really is will having 3 M2 SSD's affect my pcie performance at all. I have a Ryzen 3600 in a MSI B550 Mortar and the main OS SSD is in the top slot with the heat sink leaving me just one more M2 slot but the third SSD will be in a pcie adaptor I have and I will probably put the storage SSD here as it wont be accessed much.
Check your motherboard manual. Using certain M.2 slots might disable some SATA ports (not that you'd care with what you plan to do), or even a PCIe slot.
The CPU provides the top M.2 slot lanes. B550 can provide one more M.2 PCIe lanes and another 4x lane. Depending on your motherboard config (eg. Wi-Fi, SATA), it may be able to provide more 1x slot lanes. So: - 1st NVMe drive top slot using CPU lanes - 2nd NVMe drive in the lower slot using B550 chipset lanes - 3rd NVMe drive in the PCIe 4x adaptor card using B550 chipset lanes BUT B550 connects to CPU via a 4x PCIe gen 3 interface. So if you are really hammering both drives connected to the B550, you won't get full performance. But that is rare for most people and certainly won't happen if your drives are destined for storage and games. TBH storage is storage. I've got a 1TB hanging on a 1x PCIe slot because my 3-slot fat GPU blocks the 4x slot. It's used for storage in the same way as my 10+ years old 1TB clicker and I don't care for its speed. My 1.9TB games drive is on the B550 M.2 slot and it's plenty fast enough.
I just dont want anything to affect the performance of a 3060ti should i ever be able to get hold of 1 but as said I doubt I'm going to saturate everything at once anyway.
I downloaded the manual and there is a problem: If you use the 2nd m.2 slot then it disables the pci-e x4 slot...
Crap, thanks for finding that out for me. I'm not being lazy but I spent nearly a week in hospital a couple of weeks back and I'm on a cocktail of meds Inc starting a heavy dose of steroids which I believe is to suppress my immune system and it all builds up sometimes and leaves me a bit foggy headed. Might have to re-utilise my Samsung 2.5 SSD instead, I really wanted to get rid of them all though. Or just have 2 1tb m2's and lose 500gb of storage from what I have now.
You'll get around 800 Mb/s transfer rate using 1x adaptor. I'm using a cheapo PCIe 1x adaptor because my PCIe lanes are laid out to be: 1x 16x space 4x. The fat GPU covers the 4x Anantech image shows B550 is capable of providing two 4x PCIe lanes to drive two NVMe drives. https://images.anandtech.com/doci/15850/Ryzen 3_B550_Press Deck_NDA Until May 7th-page-005.jpg For your MSI board, I think I see what's going on. MSI have decided SATA and Wi-Fi is more important than PCIe lanes for flexibility. They've given you 2x extra SATA, leaving 8. Then one 4x for either M.2 or PCIe slot, and the other 4x is split into two 1x and two for built-in Wi-Fi. My Asus board have done it slightly differently. Two out of 10 lanes for WiFi. No extra SATA (just the standard 4) and then provides two full 4x lanes. Then splits the 4x slot to 1x and 2x if 1x were occupied. PCIe lanes are always more useful than SATA ports........
Just the cheapest one off ebay. I don't recommend the one I have, my double sided SSD touches a resistor on there and bends the cheapo board slightly. It's also vertical because I have put a beefy heatsink on the M.2 connected to CPU, so anything that extends beyond PCIe slot won't fit. Being vertical, it's not secure, just hangs from the PCIe slot. My one is exactly like this one: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/402480578684?hash=item5db5b6407c:g:Ai4AAOSw5hJffngp Something like this one should work well: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07R9VB35J
So I'm thinking of going for a 2tb as there's no point in having to upgrade again later on, may as well splash out now and get it over and done with plus it saves me another £8 on an adaptor. It doesnt need to be anything super fast or fancy so is anyone using either of these? WD with 5 year warranty but about £13 dearer Kingston but with only 3 year warranty
That's quite a difference isn't it, didn't notice that thanks. Hence the 5 year warranty i suppose and well worth the extra £13
I really don't want to spend this sort of money right now but i think it needs to done (that's my rationalisation anyway )
So amazon were supposed to deliver my SSD today and didn't, great. Anyway when it comes I want to switch them around and have my new one as the windows and games drive and my older 1tb as storage, am I going to run into any problems cloning M2 SSD's?
