Hi everyone, I just finished building my very first computer and I had a few questions about M.2 and Sata Express on my board,

[Trevor B_91]

Hi everyone, I just finished building my very first computer and I had a few questions about M.2 and Sata Express on my board, and if I should be using it or not. I am running an Asus Z97-A motherboard that supports M.2, Sata Express and Sata 6. Currently, I have a Samsung SSD 128GB as my boot drive, a 2TB WD Green as my backup drive and a blu-ray optical Drive. How should I have these wired into my board for the most efficient use?

 

[USAFRet]

Hi everyone, I just finished building my very first computer and I had a few questions about M.2 and Sata Express on my board, and if I should be using it or not. I am running an Asus Z97-A motherboard that supports M.2, Sata Express and Sata 6. Currently, I have a Samsung SSD 128GB as my boot drive, a 2TB WD Green as my backup drive and a blu-ray optical Drive. How should I have these wired into my board for the most efficient use?

Your Samsung wired into a SATA III port is just fine.

 

[Tom Tancredi]

M.2 is pretty cool from what I read. Rather then a SSD, HDD or even thumb drive your 'SSD'ish card you slide into the M.2 slot sort of like the SD Cards you slide into your MP3 player or Cell Phone. It runs all on the 'card' you put in the M2 as a boot drive instead, and you can get as large or larger then a SSD for about / less the price. This frees up the hardware space and cabling for your system.

And SATAe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express
SATA Express (abbreviated from Serial ATA Express and sometimes unofficially shortened to SATAe) is a computer bus interface that supports both Serial ATA (SATA) and PCI Express (PCIe) storage devices, initially standardized in the SATA 3.2 specification.[1] The SATA Express connector used on the host side is backward compatible with the standard 3.5-inch SATA data connector,[2] while it also provides multiple PCI Express lanes as a pure PCI Express connection to the storage device.

So again this is a way to cut down the cabling while improving performance but also compatible with what it out there 'off the shelf'.