M.2 expansion

[DeltaActual]

Hello,

 

I recently bought a quad m.2 expansion card from Asus. I installed 4 1tb m.2 drives in it and when I boot up my PC, only one drive is detected. I checked for drivers but I couldn't find any that would fix the problem. I've tested each slot with one drive and they all function as expected. Just not with 4 drives. I'm assuming it's a motherboard limitation. I've got an MSI X370 Gaming Plus. CPU is an R7 5800X3D. I have a drive installed in the onboard m.2 slot. Would I need to upgrade to a B550 or X570 mobo? Or is this a platform limitation I'm coming up against?

[Electronics Wizardy]

Those 4 m.2 cards really aren't made for desktop platforms like am4/am5 due to pcie lane limits. I'd really try to get a single 4 TB m.2 or get SATA SSDs here if possible. 

 

Do you care about GPU performance? You need your GPU to run off the chipset lanes to use that M.2 card with 4 drives and that will hurt GPU performance a moderate amount.

[Blue4130]

38 minutes ago, DeltaActual said:

Hello,

 

I recently bought a quad m.2 expansion card from Asus. I installed 4 1tb m.2 drives in it and when I boot up my PC, only one drive is detected. I checked for drivers but I couldn't find any that would fix the problem. I've tested each slot with one drive and they all function as expected. Just not with 4 drives. I'm assuming it's a motherboard limitation. I've got an MSI X370 Gaming Plus. CPU is an R7 5800X3D. I have a drive installed in the onboard m.2 slot. Would I need to upgrade to a B550 or X570 mobo? Or is this a platform limitation I'm coming up against?

If you check your motherboard manual you will see that the second pcie slot is only wired for x4 (or at best x8 if dropping the primary down to x8 also) despite being physically x16 sized. Consumer CPU's don't have enough lanes for more than one full x16 slot.