What type of SSD is supported my motherboard?

[Pasgui9]

I have an MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max motherboard (Ryzen 5 3600), and I'm thinking of buying an M.2 SSD sometime soon. I have a choice between two similarly priced SSD, however one is a Kingston A2000 with 2200MB/s read with 500GB of storage, and the other is a 970 EVO with half the storage but 3500MB/s. Is it worth it going for the 970 EVO? And is it supported by my motherboard at these speeds?

[Kanna]

So looking up the motherboard you will be able to get most of the speed from the 970 EVO

 

[Murasaki]

They're both PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 which your motherboard (and processor) will support. Keep in mind your SATA5 and SATA6 ports will be disabled when your M.2 slot is populated.

[Pasgui9]

2 minutes ago, Kanna said:

So looking up the motherboard you will be able to get most of the speed from the 970 EVO

 

Ah, thank you. I did read that but I did not really understand it.

[Pasgui9]

Just now, Murasaki said:

They're both PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 which your motherboard (and processor) will support. Keep in mind your SATA5 and SATA6 ports will be disabled when your M.2 slot is populated.

Yes, I read that in the manual. Does this only apply if the M.2 SSD is SATA or is it regardless of the technology?

[Murasaki]

7 minutes ago, Pasgui9 said:

Yes, I read that in the manual. Does this only apply if the M.2 SSD is SATA or is it regardless of the technology?

Differs per motherboard. However in your case the manual says its a "Key M" M.2 Slot meaning M.2 NVMe, not M.2 SATA.

[Chris Pratt]

They're both PCIe 3.0, which is the highest your motherboard supports, though the 970 evo obviously fully utilizes the bus much more.

 

In truth, you can't even notice that much of a difference in gaming between 600Mbps (SATA) and 2000Mbps, let alone between 2000Mbps and 3500Mbps. Eventually, games may start taking more use of fast storage, but even when that starts to happen, you'll need PCIe 4.0 to benefit from it.

 

They're both quality drives, so you're probably opting for the Kingston, unless you're also doing read intensive productivity tasks.

 

 

[Pasgui9]

7 hours ago, Chris Pratt said:

They're both PCIe 3.0, which is the highest your motherboard supports, though the 970 evo obviously fully utilizes the bus much more.

 

In truth, you can't even notice that much of a difference in gaming between 600Mbps (SATA) and 2000Mbps, let alone between 2000Mbps and 3500Mbps. Eventually, games may start taking more use of fast storage, but even when that starts to happen, you'll need PCIe 4.0 to benefit from it.

 

They're both quality drives, so you're probably opting for the Kingston, unless you're also doing read intensive productivity tasks.

 

 

Wouldn't the 970 be better for windows in general? Like loading apps faster or generally things loading in smoother and stuttering less?

 

[Chris Pratt]

Not noticeably so in most cases. You'd only see a difference in heavy read applications, like maybe scrubbing through 4K raw or similar. Normal day to day drive usage will so quick either way, you'd be fighting over milliseconds. 2000MBps is no slouch. That's 2GB of read every single second. Again, unless you're doing heavy video editing, it's doubtful you'd even have many files on your system that even exceeded 2GB.

[Pasgui9]

9 hours ago, Chris Pratt said:

Not noticeably so in most cases. You'd only see a difference in heavy read applications, like maybe scrubbing through 4K raw or similar. Normal day to day drive usage will so quick either way, you'd be fighting over milliseconds. 2000MBps is no slouch. That's 2GB of read every single second. Again, unless you're doing heavy video editing, it's doubtful you'd even have many files on your system that even exceeded 2GB.

Alright. Thank you for your advice!