Double NVME Drives on X570

[Zaptecc]

Hi all,

 

I was wondering if it makes any sense for me to get 2 NVME drives for my rig. I'm currently downsizing, and my new case is so small that it only supports M.2 drives. I have the ASUS ROG STRIX X570-I, which has 2 M.2 slots. From what I understand, one is linked to the chipset and one is linked to the CPU itself. Ideally I would like to have a 500GB PCIE 4.0 boot drive, and a 2TB PCIE 3.0 storage drive. I'm posting this because I'm still unsure if I will even reach full speeds with this configuration. I'd be totally willing to just get a 2TB SATA M.2 drive, but as far as I can tell they are almost exactly the same price and I'd love to get the extra speeds of an NVME drive if it doesn't cost any extra. Also, I'm not sure if this matters, but I'm currently using a Ryzen 5 2600X (I know it doesn't support PCIE 4 but I plan on upgrading to a 3900X eventually)

 

Thanks!

[Aniallation]

The speed+latency difference between the chipset lanes and CPU lanes isn't as big of a deal as a lot of people make it out to be for some reason. A storage drive will still perform plenty fast even if it has to be running on the chipset. 

[Zaptecc]

2 minutes ago, Aniallation said:

The speed+latency difference between the chipset lanes and CPU lanes isn't as big of a deal as a lot of people make it out to be for some reason. A storage drive will still perform plenty fast even if it has to be running on the chipset. 

Good to know, thank you

[NewMaxx]

You can reach full speeds as there's up to x4 PCIe 4.0 bandwidth for both (for the primary M.2 socket, and for the chipset). The chipset M.2 socket does have higher latency, a bigger issue I've noticed is that it can impact certain NVMe drives more, namely SM2262/EN-based. Unfortunately I was never able to get confirmation from AMD or SMI on this issue but storage performance as a whole is imperfect over X570. In any case, it's possible to run three x4 PCIe 3.0 drives without much issue, and in fact I run five using a Hyper.