So I have an ASRock Z97 OC Formula motherboard. I have been looking to add an M.2 drive in order to speed up my OS (I know not much but it's not too much money.) The issue though is that I have heard some things that suggest that it messes with the PCIe lanes and could slow down performance in an SLI/Crossfire situation. I currently have a Radeon R9 Fury and I'm probably going to add another one in the near future, so I would like to know if putting an M.2 drive into my build would hurt performance on crossfire Fury's or if I have nothing to worry about and can just go ahead and buy it.
Would M.2 be good or bad?
- Thread starter Nick501
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corroded
Splendid
- Sep 5, 2011
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Firstly, get a look at the manual for that MoBo... What does it say about the use of M.2 SSD's? Normally, they share a SATA port and adding one disables that SATA port on the board. Beyond that, look to the manual and look for direct testing of your MoBo...
You have a PCI-E Gen 2 x2 M2 slot that will provide 10Gb/s. A full speed M2 slot is PCI-E Gen 3 x4 and provides 32Gb/s throughput.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/z97%20oc%20formula/
Your slot will allow something like the 960 Evo or Pro to run at about half speed. I don't see mention of NVMe support though so you may lack the BIOS module that allows you to boot. So the best you could do is a half speed 960 Evo as a storage drive.
Non NVMe M2 drives ( Any that share a 2.5" desktop model like the 850 Evo or the Crucial M300 etc etc ) also share a controller and NAND with the desktop model and as such are the same speed. Only NVMe drives are fast.
http://www.asrock.com/mb/intel/z97%20oc%20formula/
Your slot will allow something like the 960 Evo or Pro to run at about half speed. I don't see mention of NVMe support though so you may lack the BIOS module that allows you to boot. So the best you could do is a half speed 960 Evo as a storage drive.
Non NVMe M2 drives ( Any that share a 2.5" desktop model like the 850 Evo or the Crucial M300 etc etc ) also share a controller and NAND with the desktop model and as such are the same speed. Only NVMe drives are fast.
I'm telling you there's no point. You can't boot off an NVMe drive. Do you really want to buy a fast, expensive M2 drive and only be able to use it as storage? It's not going to speed anything up. There's a reason storage grade hard drives are usually 5200 or 5400RPM. You don't even need a fast hard drive as storage much less an NVMe SSD. And yes it will still use PCI-E lanes.
blazeaglory
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