Multiple m.2 drives question

[GC85]

Hi all

 

So I have recently bought and built myself a new Ryzen 3xxx series system, though the actual CPU is still missing as there seems to be a lovely 3 month waiting period for CPU's as they are out of stock.

 

I have an Asus Strix E-Gaming X570 board which I see does have 2 x m.2 slots. One run by the CPU, which will be the PCIe 4.0 one, and then a PCIe 3.0 run by the chipset. With my build I bought a Western Digital Black 1TB NVMe PCIe 3.0 as PCIe 4.0 drives are out of stock like the CPU.

 

1) Should I put this drive into the PCIe 4.0 slot or the PCIe 3.0 slot?

2) Will there really be a that a massive difference in speed from the 2 slots?

3) Should I decide later to get a new PCIe 4.0 drive, is it possible to have a Windows installation on each drive, and then choose which to boot to during startup like previous versions of Windows? The reason I ask this, as a Software Developer, having your gaming OS and development OS on the same drive, does screw things up very nicely, and I would very much like to keep them separate.

 

Thanks

[Mira Yurizaki]

7 minutes ago, GC85 said:

1) Should I put this drive into the PCIe 4.0 slot or the PCIe 3.0 slot?

2) Will there really be a that a massive difference in speed from the 2 slots?

It doens't matter. A PCIe 3.0 drive will only talk up to PCIe 3.0 speeds.

Quote

3) Should I decide later to get a new PCIe 4.0 drive, is it possible to have a Windows installation on each drive, and then choose which to boot to during startup like previous versions of Windows? The reason I ask this, as a Software Developer, having your gaming OS and development OS on the same drive, does screw things up very nicely, and I would very much like to keep them separate.

You could if this helps give you peace of mind. However, PCIe 4.0 drives are pointless to consumers. Even PCIe 3.0 drives don't offer much tangible benefit over SATA SSDs in most use cases consumers run across. So just get another PCIe 3.0 drive and save yourself some money.

Edited July 24, 2019 by Mira Yurizaki
Had to clarify what a PCIe device can talk to

[SupaKomputa]

Pcie is backward compatible, you can put 4 in 3 vice versa.

If you put 4 in 3, the speed is going to be 3.

But if you put 3 in 4, the speed is still 3.