New Build plan: M.2 help

[Gruhn101]

I'm a hobby photographer who's getting into video editing on the side. I'm wanting a MOBO that can handle Thunderbolt for future transfer rate ability.  Currently considering going with the Gigabyte Z170X-Gaming 7 board as the new firmware update permits Thunderbolt: http://www.gigabyte.com/press-center/news-page.aspx?nid=1399   

 

I've built several PCs in the past but its been a few years and I've not dealt with M.2 before. My current plan was to boot from a SSD and have two RAID drives composed of three 2TB drives in RAID 5 for media storage and two 1TB drives in RAID 0 for games (not concerned about drive failure).  I've been reading up on the M.2 format and was intrigued (more speed=very nice).  I would use the M.2 as my boot/main program install file (not games) and am not interested in setting up the M.2 drives in RAID. 

 

I read a review of another board where someone installed an M.2 drive but in so doing it disabled a couple of his standard SATA III plugs... the review stated that by using the M.2 drive the bandwidth of those two plugs was consumed rendering them unusable.  I've not been able to find another source to support this claim.  This has inclined me towards caution seeing as how the board I'm choosing only has 6 SATA III ports and I'll be plugging 5 HHDs and a BlueRay burner into them, I can't afford to have two plugs not work... without buying external options (which is not ideal). I won't be using any of the SATA express plugs... least not yet. I read the MOBO manual... it was unhelpful in clarifying things (perhaps just me).  

 

Therefore, the main question being how do M.2 drives (when installed into the dedicated MOBO ports) impact the other ports?  Will it interfere with my discrete GPU since it uses PCIe lanes?  Any advice/recommendations would greatly save me time.

 

The M.2 I'm considering is Samsung's 950 PRO PCIe 3.0 x4.  Its not listed on Gigabyte's compatable list but I see no reason why it wouldn't work with the board, can anyone speak to that?

 

Just signed up here, this being my first post.

 

Cheers and much thanks.

 

G

[jascraft123]

From what i've read, the m.2 port will probably render about 2 sata ports unusable and so I recommend just sticking with a sata ssd unless you really have no room for another drive.

[Curufinwe_wins]

All of Asus's boards if I remember correctly have on board thunderbolt headers... Might be worth checking out.

 

M.2 drives are kinda a per board thing. Some close off sata, some do nothing, some close off pcie slots (don't worry it will never prevent you or impact you doing 1 GPU configurations.)

 

I would try to find out from reading specific reviews on the product.

 

As for working/not working the 950 Pro will work don't worry about that.

 

EDIT: In this particular situation, the bottom m.2 is your best bet (that board supports 2 m.2 slots). Using a m.2 in that slot kills the bottom pcie slot (but that doesn't matter anyways since you can't do 3 way in any situation), and DOES NOT affect sata ports. I haven't found what the top one does. Here is a good review on the board though.

 

http://techreport.com/review/29072/gigabyte-z170x-gaming-7-motherboard-reviewed

 

EDIT 2: The top m.2 slot kills 3 sata ports, so don't use that one...

[Gruhn101]

Thanks, I hadn't seen that review, the one's I had read didn't mention the M.2 impact in such a detailed way... which is more complicated than I would think it should be but such is life.  @Curufinwe_wins Thanks for the info!  looks like I'll only grab one M.2  I usually don't populate the lowest pcie slots anyway. No loss.