z97 ASUS Z97-AR PCI-e M.2 Adapter

[compute]

Hello everyone!

 

I have the ASUS Z97-AR motherboard and I was planning to buy a M.2 SSD drive for it, Samsung SSD 960 EVO (http://www.samsung.com/us/computing/memory-storage/solid-state-drives/ssd-960-evo-m-2-250gb-mz-v6e250bw/)

Until I did some research and realized my motherboard's M.2 slot uses PCI express 2.0 and only 2 lanes, so I wouldn't be able to get full speeds from my M.2 drive.

 

Is it possible to get that full speed on my motherboard if I use a PCI-express 3.0 M.2 Adapter for the M.2 SSD? This is the adapter I was looking at (https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboard-Accessory/HYPER_M2_X4_MINI_CARD/)

 

I would also really appreciate any other tips on installing it (what I need to configure in the BIOS to install Windows on the M.2 drive, etc)

 

Thanks!

 

 

[Tiwaz]

if you dont plan on running SLI or Crossfire then go for the adapter, but you have to ask yourself if an m.2 drive is really worth it. In the real world both a good SATA 3 SSD and an m.2 drive have excellent performacne and you will only know a diffrence when you are doing a lot of copying or reading like when rendering

[compute]

5 minutes ago, Tiwaz said:

if you dont plan on running SLI or Crossfire then go for the adapter, but you have to ask yourself if an m.2 drive is really worth it. In the real world both a good SATA 3 SSD and an m.2 drive have excellent performacne and you will only know a diffrence when you are doing a lot of copying or reading like when rendering

I'm aware of this and I'm fine with it not being actually faster in practice (in most cases). As far as I know, M.2 drives are bottlenecked by the CPU, so possibly in the future when that is no longer the case I will already have the faster SSD to use. 

 

My biggest concern is that will my motherboard actually support this kind of adapter setup and how can I verify I'm able to install Windows on it?

[Tiwaz]

26 minutes ago, compute said:

I'm aware of this and I'm fine with it not being actually faster in practice (in most cases). As far as I know, M.2 drives are bottlenecked by the CPU, so possibly in the future when that is no longer the case I will already have the faster SSD to use. 

 

My biggest concern is that will my motherboard actually support this kind of adapter setup and how can I verify I'm able to install Windows on it?

if the adapter and ssd are working it should always work, but maybe you can find people on some forums with a similar mobo and setup and ask them if you arent sure, I personally am still gonna stay with sata III because htat always works fine and its cheaper per Gb and fast enough for me