Help with M.2 drives

[v3rk]

I know that M.2 is only a form factor, and it had been many years since I built a PC so I enlisted the help of pcpartpicker.com. I will list my MB and drives as everything else works fine:

 

MB: ASRock B450M Pro4. 2 M.2 slots, with M2_1 supporting M Key type 2242/2260/2280 M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 (32 Gb/s) with my Pinnacle Ridge Ryzen 7 2700 CPU and M_2 supporting M Key type 2230/2242/2260/2280 M.2 SATA3 6.0 Gb/s module.

 

M.2 drive 1: Samsung 970 Evo PCIe Gen 3.0 x4, NVMe 1.3 M.2 2280 SSD

 

M.2 drive 2: XPG SX8100 PCIe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 SSD

 

I intended to use the Samsung as a boot drive and the XPG as storage (maybe overkill, but I'm used to having even less space on my old pc including HDD). Neither of these drives will work in the M2_2 slot, but both work in the M2_1 slot. Is there something I missed in the compatibility of these drives with my MB's M2_2 slot? I trusted pcpartpicker but also did research, and everything I could find was that PCIe M.2 drives were backwards compatible with SATA3 M.2 drives. I fully admit I could be wrong, but I don't know where to go from here. Any help or insight is GREATLY appreciated.

[Zagna]

NVMe drives need PCI Express and won't work in SATA only slots.

One way would be to get an M.2 adapter and plug the XPG in the second PCIe 16x slot which is 2.0 4x from the chipset.