X570 Chipset and PCIE lane sharing

[Anomnomnomaly]

So I've been reading up ont he specs of the X570 chipset as I am thinking of upgrading my current rig with a new CPU/MB and using the current ones to upgrade my mediaserver (which is still last gen FX CPU/AM3+).

 

The one thing that bugged me about my current B450 board (Gigabyte Aorus Pro) is that when you use the M.2 slots you lose 2 SATA sockets, and if you use the 2nd M.2 slot.. you lose another 2 SATA sockets... With a board that only has 6 to begin with... It really limits you. As I found out when I can't plug my BDrom drive in as 4 sata sockets are populated with hard drives along with an NVME drive for the OS and essentials. (2x 1TB SSD and 2x 3TB HDD that are all used either for gaming and or storage of stuff I can't keep on my 30TB mediaserver).

 

Now on the X570, I read about the pick one part... so you can have either 1x 4x NVME or 1x 2x m.2 + 2 SATA slots.... So would I be right in assuming that this means you could reclaim those 2 extra SATA sockets (assuming they have 6 in total) but slow down your NVME by up to 50%?

 

I really don't want to make the same mistake when buying a new board... losing 2 SATA sockets was something I was completely unaware was possible... In all of the reviews and research I did before buying anything... It's not something I EVER saw mentioned by anyone. Not LTT, GN, Kyle, Paul, Jay and so forth and so forth.

 

Obviously as I need a minimum of 5 sata ports available to me, but at the same time don;t want to lose any performance of the NVME drive... So either my understanding is wrong, or I'll be needing an X570 with at least 8 sockets.

[Lurick]

From what I can tell, from what I've seen anyway, the motherboard makers will choose if you get a 4x PCIe NVMe slot and no extra SATA ports (you won't lose any) -OR- if you'll get +2 SATA ports on the board but the NVMe will only operate at 2x PCIe 4.0. So you'll either have 6 SATA port boards or 8 SATA port boards.

[paddy-stone]

From ones I have taken a gander at, it's usually 1st NVME port uses pci-e lanes anyway, so no sata ports affected. On the x570 boards, if you use the 2nd m.2 slot, then you lose functionality of 2nd/3rd pci-e slot or vice versa.

 

IMO if you wanted more SATA ports and only use 1 of the m.2 ports, you could (on some boards at least) have an HBA card in there like an LSI 9211-i8 with breakout cables to give you upto 8 extra SATA ports. This is how I used to have my b350 main pc set up like, so know that this works. the above card usually retails on the bay for around £40/$40 new from what I can recall.

[mariushm]

The B450 chipset has only 8 pci-e 2.0 lanes going out, so it's hard to put pci-e lanes into m.2 connectors and also have pci-e slots created by chipset.

So the SATA controllers have to be disabled (turning off SATA ports) to free up pci-e lanes for m.2 connectors.

 

The x570 chipset is supposed to offer 12 pci-e lanes, so there should be more flexibility, and less need to disable SATA ports.

You would have to check the manual before though.

 

Also note that currently on your motherboard, the 2nd M.2 connector has only pci-e 2.0 x2, 2 pci-e lanes ... pci-e 2.0 is only 500 MB/s so you really have a maximum of 1 GB/s which is not that much higher than regular SATA.

If the second SSD didn't feel slow to you, then maybe in the future it would be easier to just go with a SATA SSD.

 

[Anomnomnomaly]

OK, that makes things a little clearer... This was the first time I'd built anything using an M.2 drive and so never even knew this could happen.

 

If it's a manufacturer decision, I'll make sure to chose a board that gives full speed on the NVME M.2 slot and allows me to still have 6 SATA sockets. I'm not that bothered about adding a 2nd M.2 drive as I have a total of 2TB in SSD's for the big games that require faster speeds and the older games are quite happy on a HDD as they're smaller and don't require so much load/access time.

 

part of it is simply so I can have ALL of my games installed rather than trying to make space by removing ones I don;t use very often... and with 200 or so on Steam and another 25 or so on Uplay plus a dozen or so on GOG.... It soon adds up.