How do expansion?

[Tibar Naisur]

Okie so I purchased a pre-built back in November (2021). It’s my first desktop and has been amazing— now is the time to start looking at adding more storage though and Ngl… I’m really lost here.

I have a MSI B550-A Pro motherboard with one m.2 SSD currently installed. I’d like to stick with SSDs. Specifically I need a drive for data storage (dwg. Files mostly). And I’d like a second drive to keep and play my steam library off of so it’s not on my OS host drive. 
 

just don’t really know where to start, everything I thought I “knew” has disappeared from my brain and I feel like I’ve gone full idiot… help please 

[Middcore]

Buy a 2.5" SSD. Put it in one of the mounting points/bays your unspecified case presumably has. Connect it to SATA power and one of the SATA ports on your motherboard. 

[Tibar Naisur]

5 minutes ago, Middcore said:

Buy a 2.5" SSD. Put it in one of the mounting points/bays your unspecified case presumably has. Connect it to SATA power and one of the SATA ports on your motherboard. 

Sorry, it’s a Corsair Vengeance case 

[Teching Marvellous]

It looks like you have a second M.2 slot below your GPU, why not utilize that with a high capacity drive?

[Middcore]

2 minutes ago, Tibar Naisur said:

Sorry, it’s a Corsair Vengeance case 

 

Over the years Corsair has put the "Vengeance" branding on literally every type of product they sell from RAM to keyboards, so this tells us very little, although judging by your pictures this is probably one of the H4000/H5000 family. 

 

2 minutes ago, Teching Marvellous said:

It looks like you have a second M.2 slot below your GPU, why not utilize that with a high capacity drive?

 

Might not be worth it cost-wise just for storage. 

[Tibar Naisur]

2 minutes ago, Middcore said:

 

Over the years Corsair has put the "Vengeance" branding on literally every type of product they sell from RAM to keyboards, so this tells us very little, although judging by your pictures this is probably one of the H4000/H5000 family. 

 

 

Might not be worth it cost-wise just for storage. 

I think is the h4000, sorry for the lack of clarity. By looking it up I found that there’s 2 2.5” bay and 2 3.5” bays accessed from the back side of the case. 
 

Unless I’m missing something the m.2 would work for a Steam Library drive and the 2.5” SATA drive would work for data storage? The limiting factors involved being write/read speeds yes?

 

Please don’t hesitate to throw a video or other recourse at me if you think it has the info I don’t.

 

thanks so very much 

[Middcore]

Just now, Tibar Naisur said:

Unless I’m missing something the m.2 would work for a Steam Library drive and the 2.5” SATA drive would work for data storage? The limiting factors involved being write/read speeds yes?

 

It's important to note that m.2 is only a form factor. There are SATA m.2 drives which are no faster than 2.5" drives and there are NVMe m.2 drives which are much faster because they use the PCIe bus. The latter is of course more expensive. 

 

For just storing large amounts of data, NVMe speeds are typically unnecessary and not worth the cost. Even for storing your Steam library, the speed advantage of NVMe over SATA really isn't going to do you any good except maybe quicker loading times; it's not going to give you more fps or anything. 

 

So basically this decision comes down largely to your budget and how much capacity you actually need. 

 

Of course m.2 of either flavor does have the convenience benefit of being simpler to install since it doesn't require any cables to be connected.