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M.2 PCIe lane allocation

Tags:
  • SSD
  • Storage
  • Motherboards
  • Gigabyte
Last response: in Storage
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October 10, 2014 8:26:23 AM

I just purchased a Gigabyte GA-Z97x-SLI motherboard yesterday. It comes with a built in M.2 slot on the board. I have 2 questions about this slot.

1) How can I find out what M.2 SSD's will work with it? (Which Key is it and what is it's max lane usage)

2) How do motherboards allocate PCIe lanes when they have a M.2 slot built onto the board? By this I mean, if I plug a M.2 x4 SSD into it does it take away 4 lanes from one of my PCIe slots?

I am not extremely familiar with the M.2 format. I have tried doing some research on it, but couldn't find much on these 2 questions.

The particular SSD I am looking into is this one.

More about : pcie lane allocation

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a b G Storage
a c 96 V Motherboard
October 10, 2014 8:52:26 AM

Should be taking away lanes from the PCIe 2.0 bus, so your PCIe 3.0 lanes will remain unaffected. You only have 3 1x slots, and a haswell chip provides PCIe 2.0 at 8x, and PCIe 3.0 at 16x or 8x/8x

Board also has 2 standard PCI slots for some reason...
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October 10, 2014 9:46:04 AM

Eximo said:
Should be taking away lanes from the PCIe 2.0 bus, so your PCIe 3.0 lanes will remain unaffected. You only have 3 1x slots, and a haswell chip provides PCIe 2.0 at 8x, and PCIe 3.0 at 16x or 8x/8x

Board also has 2 standard PCI slots for some reason...


So if I run SLI, the SLI will run on PCIe 3.0 8x/8x and if I add a M.2 SSD it could take up to 4 lanes from my 8 PCIe 2.0 lanes leaving me 4 lanes for things such as a sound card which usually only use 1 2.0 lane.

Sounds like everything I want will work on the board.

Are the M.2 slots on motherboards B key, M key, or the combination as shown in the photo?

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a b G Storage
a c 96 V Motherboard
October 10, 2014 1:14:17 PM

From the description on Wikipedia and the a close look at the picture of the motherboard it is M-keyed for 4 PCIe lanes. It undoubtedly accepts both.
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October 10, 2014 1:31:18 PM

Eximo said:
From the description on Wikipedia and the a close look at the picture of the motherboard it is M-keyed for 4 PCIe lanes. It undoubtedly accepts both.


Cool thanks.
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