M.2 Compatible with my Motherboard?

JMedlock83 said:

Idk what I did with it then. Mine is an Asus board. might just tape it down with electrical tape for the time being and order M.2 screws

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Be careful when looking to buy screws, I'd heard, but can't confirm, Asus boards can be a bear for m.2 screws. I'd actually read a thread on that, but I've no idea where it was now as I don't use Asus boards.

Regardless, good luck.

Overwhelmingly, the biggest advantage to the SSD is the fact that it has random access times in tenths of milliseconds versus 10's of milliseconds. Back in the day, a sata spinner drive might take 15ms to get to a file, whereas an SSD can get there in 0.1ms.

today, we focus on read/write speeds as the primary spec of all newer technologies, and we also look at iops and drive endurance. The issue with read/write speeds, is that we almost never push these drives to the max, or anywhere near it. For example, to boot our operating system and launch a game, we aren't dependent on reading 16GB of data sequentially, instead we are pulling a bit from here, and a bit from there, and waiting on a service, and loading textures to the video card, and waiting on other people to join the game lobby, etc, etc, etc. In other words, while our drive could do 7,000MB/sec, as long as it could do 175MB/sec it's enough for it to keep up with everything else the system is waiting on.

If you constantly move gigantic files around from 1 drive to another in your system and they are both PCIe Gen 4 drives, you will see big gains and the files will copy potentially at 5GB/sec. That could be 10x faster than a SATA SSD doing the same thihg. In this case, the gains are huge.

Of course, another awesome benefit to the NVMe drive is that it doesn't require a power and a data cable. As somebody who wants super clean wiring in the case, this is a very nice added benefit.

pparks1 said:

Moving my games over to my SATA SSD made extra space on my NVMe drive for running VM's and the extra speed and # of iop's helps significantly in this area.

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As a gamer and having both SATA and NVMe drives in my system, putting games on an NVMe drive is a waste of space as there will be no discernible difference. In fact, there isn't much difference between SSD/NVMe and HDD drives outside faster load times for SSD/NVMe drives.

With that as I have no HDD drives attached to my system all my games get installed on a 2TB Samsung SSD drive.

Dru2 said:

Be careful when looking to buy screws, I'd heard, but can't confirm, Asus boards can be a bear for m.2 screws. I'd actually read a thread on that, but I've no idea where it was now as I don't use Asus boards.

Regardless, good luck.

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I'm gonna see if I can order them directly from Asus

I found a screw to hold it temporarily

Installing Windows now after a bit of a struggle. Kept gettin error code then realized I had to unhook my other drives first.

Windows should activate automatically even though I changed drives, right?

JMedlock83 said:

Windows should activate automatically even though I changed drives, right?

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Yes. If using a digital license with a Microsoft Account, once you log in it should activate

It might use one of these things

SIW2 said:

It might use one of these things

View attachment 49609

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003660922990.html

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I assume you have ordered things from that website? I've thought about it, but I didn't know if it was legit or not.

It is legit, but it is quicker if you can find the product locally though usually more expensive.

Porthos said:

If you are good with a Gen 3 drive, I have installed 12 of these already with no issues. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07L6DKM8...olid=2C62N8Q8N0AKG&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

View attachment 49077

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I wasn't familiar with that brand, apparently good value according to the review

JMedlock83 said:

I don't have a screw for the M.2 Drive. I can't install it

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If you bought your motherboard new I bet it came with two M.2 screws. Maybe you forgot it did. Did you keep the original box? If so look for two very small bags with screws in them.

I bought an ASUS Prime X370-Pro motherboard in April 2017. It only has one M.2 slot so only came with one M.2 screw in a small bag. I bought an NVME M.2 SSD when I bought that motherboard so used the screw that came with the motheboard then.

Since I only have one M.2 slot on the motherboard I later added a 2nd M.2 NVMe SSD by adding a PCIe card with an M.2 slot.

MisterEd said:

If you bought your motherboard new I bet it came with two M.2 screws. Maybe you forgot it did. Did you keep the original box? If so look for two very small bags with screws in them.

I bought an ASUS Prime X370-Pro motherboard in April 2017. It only has one M.2 slot so only came with one M.2 screw in a small bag. I bought an NVME M.2 SSD when I bought that motherboard so used the screw that came with the motheboard then.

Since I only have one M.2 slot on the motherboard I later added a 2nd M.2 NVMe SSD by adding a PCIe card with an M.2 slot.

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Yeah i bought it new back in 2017. I have all of my screws and stuff in little cases, and I went through all of them and couldn't find one.

I ordered some m.2 screws from Amazon specifically for my board. So far, so good. Now it's just the time consuming moment of installing all of my software back.