m.2 pcie questions

[Kalabalana]

I have an ASRock Z77 Extreme4 which does not have any m.2 drive slots
so I must get an m.2 pcie adapter.
What are the considerations I must have?
I know the m.2 must use the pcie bus and not sata
But I am wondering if the adapter has to be specific, also, can I get 2 and raid them for greater speeds?
I was thinking two 512 GB Intel 600Ps

I have a 1080 gtx, and I know sharing the second pcie 16x slot will knock both down to 8x, but one slot will be cpu heavy and one will be chipset heavy on the channel usage? So it shouldn't affect my 1080 (Not even sure if 8x would bottleneck it in the first place)?

Also one last area of doubt I have, what is the difference between the Intel 600p m.2s and the Intel 750 AIC for my pcie slot? The read speeds seem to blow the 600s out of the water?

Anyways, sorry for not being particularly educated on the subject, I trust and respect the members of this forum, and hope you might share some of your knowledge with me, thank you for reading!

 

[Kalabalana]

Where are the experts, or did we all get caught with our pants down?

 

[Bandalo]

I have an ASRock Z77 Extreme4 which does not have any m.2 drive slots
so I must get an m.2 pcie adapter.
What are the considerations I must have?
I know the m.2 must use the pcie bus and not sata
But I am wondering if the adapter has to be specific, also, can I get 2 and raid them for greater speeds?
I was thinking two 512 GB Intel 600Ps

I have a 1080 gtx, and I know sharing the second pcie 16x slot will knock both down to 8x, but one slot will be cpu heavy and one will be chipset heavy on the channel usage? So it shouldn't affect my 1080 (Not even sure if 8x would bottleneck it in the first place)?

Also one last area of doubt I have, what is the difference between the Intel 600p m.2s and the Intel 750 AIC for my pcie slot? The read speeds seem to blow the 600s out of the water?

Anyways, sorry for not being particularly educated on the subject, I trust and respect the members of this forum, and hope you might share some of your knowledge with me, thank you for reading!

So to answer this, you really need the manual for your MB, because every board is a little different. I'm at work so I can't look it up your specifics, BUT:

1. You should have 20 lanes of PCI 3.0 available with your CPU. 16 for the GPU, and 4 left for whatever else. (m.2 slots or PCI slots). But again, it depends largely on the MB configuration, so YMMV. That being said, running the GPU at 8x probably won't significantly affect your games unless you're running bleeding edge OCs at 4k.

2. Support for NVMe is dependent on the MB and BIOS version. Z77 was hit-or-miss, but anything newer should be supported out of the box. If your BIOS/UEFI doesn't support it, make sure you get a AHCI m.2 drive.

3. Adapters (PCIe -> m.2) are pretty much just that, connection adapters, so they're not complex and don't vary much from brand to brand other than appearance.

4. Most of the newer m.2 drives are pretty comparable on performance. The benchmarks will show some differences, but in any home-use type system, you're not going to see any real-world performance differences. So get one with a good warranty and a good price.