Which m.2 Drive to Choose?(Solved)

[Grennyfell97]

This might have been brought up but I had no idea what to search to begin. When I built my PC I chose a motherboard with a few extra features, one of those being an m.2 slot as I was looking at getting myself a nice fast storage upgrade in the future, the future being around now. I want to know if I would be wasting dollars on a higher speed m.2 stick. The board is an MSI Z97-Guard-Pro and its description says that it supports m.2 and SATA Express through PCIe 2.0 x2... The SSD I was looking at was a WD Black 512gb which says that it runs on a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface. Are these compatible? Would I just be wasting the potential of the drive? 

[seon123]

What will you be doing with the PC? Most likely it would be a waste, even on a more modern platform

[reapzzer]

If the port is rated at PCIE 2.0 x2 speeds then the port would max out at around 1GB/s (if I did my calculation wrong please correct me). So you could just buy a cheaper nvme SSD like an intel 600P and the bottleneck should be less noticeable. I definitely not recommend you sticking in something like a 960 evo inside of that port.

[Grennyfell97]

Just now, reapzzer said:

If the port is rated at PCIE 2.0 x2 speeds then the port would max out at around 1GB/s (if I did my calculation wrong please correct me). So you could just buy a cheaper nvme SSD like an intel 600P and the bottleneck should be less noticeable. I definitely not recommend you sticking in something like a 960 evo inside of that port.

Dang, that's what I thought. The product description from MSI states 10Gb/s which is about 1.25GB/s. But will a stick with the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface still work in my 2.0 x2 slot but just at a slower speed?

[reapzzer]

Just now, Grennyfell97 said:

Dang, that's what I thought. The product description from MSI states 10Gb/s which is about 1.25GB/s. But will a stick with the PCIe 3.0 x4 interface still work in my 2.0 x2 slot but just at a slower speed?

It will work just at the max speed possible which in this case will be around that 1.25GB/s mark.

[Grennyfell97]

Just now, reapzzer said:

It will work just at the max speed possible which in this case will be around that 1.25GB/s mark.

Thanks for the super fast replies. My main concern was an incompatibility with the interfaces. 

[GER_T4IGA]

1 hour ago, reapzzer said:

If the port is rated at PCIE 2.0 x2 speeds then the port would max out at around 1GB/s (if I did my calculation wrong please correct me). So you could just buy a cheaper nvme SSD like an intel 600P and the bottleneck should be less noticeable. I definitely not recommend you sticking in something like a 960 evo inside of that port.

Judging by the Mi Notebook Pro's performance with a PM961 on a 2xPCIe interface 1.5GB read is possible from what I have seen. (also 4x goes up to 3300MB/s on the 960 pro for example)