SSD's

jdrithchie06 · March 31, 2022

**my system**

Ryzen 5600x

RTX 2060 (OC 6gbs)

ASUS ROG STRIX x570 (x2 M.2 slots)

16gbs@3200mhz of Corsair vengance LPX (ddr4)

250 GB 970 EVO M.2 Ssd

Crucial BX500 480GB 2.5" ssd

ASUS ROG STRIX 750w modular PSU

Hello my name is Jordan, very amatuer builder and had a few questions in regards to storage,

1. Is Raiding with a PCIE m.2 expansion card worth it

2. Does using a M.2 PCIE expansion card slow down your whole system (all 4 bays filled with samsung 970 evos)

3. am i better off getting 2.5" ssd (samsung 870 QVO)instead of using an expansion card (all m.2s would be samsung 970 evos)

Thankyou, Regards Jordan

Shimejii · March 31, 2022

#1 No its pretty much never worth raiding.

#2 it can be if you dont have en ough PCIE lanes, but generally you wont ntoice it.

Sata SSDS are fine for most games, The new Direct Storage wont matter for around 2 years so NVME wont be needed until then.

mariushm · March 31, 2022

1. No , RAID is not worth it for SSDs.

2. SATA SSDs are just like regular mechanical drives, they don't put more or less stress on the processor. Doesn't matter how many. As for M.2 (nvme) SSDs, the M.2 connectors have their own pci-e lanes. Usually the first M.2 connector has pci-e lanes that come directly from CPU, and the 2nd M.2 has pci-e lanes coming from chipset, and then the chipset is connected to the processors using a dedicated connection that's equivalent to a pci-e x4 connection.

You could potentially "slow" down the computer, if you read at very high speed files from multiple nvme SSDs connected to chipset, because data has to reach the processor so the data from multiple SSDs would be "squeezed" through the connection between chipset and processor, so you won't get the maximum speed possible.

3. DO NOT use SSDs which use QLC memory. Stick to SSDs that use TLC memory, they're faster and have higher endurance.

Pay attention to how many actual pci-e lanes are available in the slot, if you plan to use pci-e adapters that have M.2 connectors on them, to add more M.2 SSD drives to your computer.

For example, while the bottom pci-e slot may be shaped as a pci-e x16 slot, it may only receive 4 or 8 pci-e lanes. If you use a Asus Hyper card that has 4 m.2 connectors on it - or a similar card - only ONE or TWO connectors will work on it, because the card simply splits the available pci-e lanes into groups of 4 lanes. So if the motherboard only has 4 pci-e lanes going to that slot, only ONE m.2 connector will work. If there's 8 pci-e lanes, only 2 connectors will work.

If your motherboard has 3 pci-e x16 slots, the second slot may "borrow" pci-e lanes from the video card pci-e slot if it's used. So for example, if there's no card in the second slot, the first slot is pci-e 4.0 x16 but if you plug a card in the second slot, the first two slots become pci-e 4.0 x8 each so your video card will be a tiny bit slower...

Also, in order for cards like Asus Hyper to work, your BIOS needs to support a feature called bifurcation. Not all motherboards support it.

There are adapters which convert a simple pci-e x4 slot into a single nvme M.2 connector, those should work as they don't split the pci-e lanes that are available in the slot.

There's some adapter cards that have two M.2 connectors but only one is nvme, connected directly to the pci-e x4 slot edge connector, and the 2nd m.2 connector is supposed to be used only with SATA SSDs and you connect a sata cable between that adapter card and the motherboard SATA ports.