M.2 SSD - What do I need to know?

[Flogger23m]

If I find a good drive that is on sale in the coming weeks I would like to consider an M.2 SSD. Currently I use SATA SSDs as well as an HDD.

I have an ASRock X370 Killer motherboard:
https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/X370 Killer SLIac/index.asp#Specification

My understanding is I can only use one M.2 SSD at full speed on this board. Am I understanding that correctly? I would also be using the M.2 for my OS/demanding programs. I plan on cloning over my SATA SSD WIn 10 install to the M.2.

Is set up and install easy, or is there anything else I need to keep in mind before moving to such a drive?

And any recommendations to a particular model to get or avoid would be appreciated. It isn't a must have upgrade for myself, but if a good sale pops up this holiday season I think it would be a good idea to get one so I can free up a SATA SSD for my laptop.

 

[mda]

Things you need to know I guess, since you're asking:

1. Your board seems to have 2 M2 sockets. I wouldn't worry so much about the 'Full speed' unless you are getting a high end NVME drive.
2. Speaking of which, M2 SSDs come in two flavors. NVME and SATA. Some boards and ports on the boards can support one, the other, or both formats. SATA M2s have exactly the same speed as their SATA SSD counterparts (speed limited by the speed of the SATA bus). NVME ones use the PCIE bus and can be faster.
3. Higher end NVME drives will of course have an advantage in peak performance, but you probably won't notice any difference in load times between your SATA SSD and even an NVME M2 unless you do giant file transfers etc.
4. For a higher end NVME drive, you can get the Samsung 960 Evo. For midrange, you can look at the Intel 600p, the Crucial MX300s and the Samsung 850 Evos. The 960 Pro is undoubtedly the top dog but unless you do crazy IO work, you will likely not notice the difference between that and the 960 Evo.
5. Setup is easy... just make sure you physically install it the correct way. (either storage chips facing up or down... I'm not 100% sure on this myself since the only M2 install I've done was on my laptop). If successful, they should pop up right away in the BIOS when selecting your boot drive. Take note that the Win7 Installer does NOT recognize NVME drives by default. You'll need to slipstream a driver for this or something.
6. Edit: To answer your question, you are correct and can only use an M2 at max speed on socket M2_1. M2_2 will work perfectly fine for lower/mid end drives though!

Hope this helps!

 

[Lepardi]

I have an older Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 with 1000MB/s restricted M.2 slot. Will any M.2 drive work, or can there there be possible limitations as its so old, for example if SATA3 M.2 drives won't work? How do I know?

 

[BinarySynapse]

Keep in mind a lot of motherboards are set up such that you may lose one or SATA ports when you're using the M.2 slots.

 

[Lepardi]

Keep in mind a lot of motherboards are set up such that you may lose one or SATA ports when you're using the M.2 slots.

Yeah I'm aware of that, will have to change the SATA port of my old SSD, as it's plugged right in that one. But there are no possibilities that an M.2 2280 drive won't work in the slot? The MX300 I'm considering is SATA3 despite being an M.2 drive, should it work fine?

 

[westrock2000]

I have an older Gigabyte Z97X-Gaming 5 with 1000MB/s restricted M.2 slot. Will any M.2 drive work, or can there there be possible limitations as its so old, for example if SATA3 M.2 drives won't work? How do I know?

You can look at the port to see the key

 

[jamesv]

2x speeds are what I prefer.
I don’t consider 1GBps a restriction.

Loved the Samsung XP, and the 950.
Used direct cooling to avoid throttling.
But 2x speeds don’t interfere with the bandwidth I use for my apps.

MyDigitalSSD SBX 512GB NVMe M.2s are what I just installed to replace my 950s.
Phison controllers are great and I stream 100% for hours with no throttling down.

Spending less for 2x is what I prefer.
Black Friday sales are coming soon too, lots of competition means we win.