Ok I own a Asrock b450m pro and I would like to populate both m.2 slots.
The trouble is the the top slot (2.1) it says
M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 for me this is confusing
I think iv found a m.2 will work but need to ask for your help
btw I apologise with my spelling and grammar .
Thanks for any info
Rob
Pretty-much all PCIe lanes are Generation 3 nowadays — you’d have to deliberately go out of your way to find something that isn’t.
x4 means four (of the aforementioned) lanes are dedicated to the slot. Four lanes provides enough bandwidth for a theoretical 4GB/s which, as you can see, is ~5–6x faster than the Adata drive you linked (720Mbps read/640Mbps write).
You’d need to spend a lot, lot more and get something like a Samsung 970 Pro to even have a chance of saturating those 4 Gen3 PCIe lanes.
So, in short, that drive will work in that slot, but it will only perform at 16–18% of the capacity of the slot. If crazy speeds don’t matter to you then that’s not an issue. If you want to take advantage of the extra speed that 4x Gen3 PCIe lanes have to offer, then consider buying a faster drive.
Thank you so much for your reply and clearing some things up for me.
Will look into a faster drive.
Again thank you.
Whilst the slot can certainly handle a faster drive, whether or not you need (would benefit from) a faster drive depends on what you are using the machine for. Most SSDs are perfectly fine for most people at this point in time.
Samsung developed an early lead on the performance front, but now most of the major players have largely caught (or are catching) up. You could save yourself a lot of money by getting something that “will do” right now, using it for a couple of years as you watch SSD prices fall and performance increase, then upgrading to a higher capacity, faster, and quite affordable SSD down the track.
So if you know you need (or would benefit) from the speed, get a faster drive. If you don’t need the speed (or aren’t sure), I’d advise trying a cheaper/slower drive — it might be perfectly adequate.
I’ve seen positive commentary about Adata SSDs over on TechDeals.
As far as I know, one of the M.2 slots is PCI-E interface, meaning it will be fine to plug the ADATA SX6000 on it. The other one I think is M.2 SATA interface, meaning you can’t use the SX6000 on it…
Also, I would highly recommend you to consider the 256GB model. The 128 is slower, 750MBps, while the 256 is 1GBps… Much faster, and considering the larger size - it have better sustainable speeds…
Just to reiterate what has been mentioned, that particular drive isn’t all that much faster than a SATA SSD. Given the two slots on the board, if you want a really small and ultra cheap SSD, you might be better off getting one that is SATA 3 and leaving the PCI-E connected one open for a faster drive.
With how cheap all forms of SSD’s are getting, it might be worthwhile to hang in there a bit to get the best price to performance ratio for your money.
Yep. On the ASRock B450M Pro4:
The (natural) speed boost granted by higher capacity drives is mainly seen in sequential transfers (when moving large files). Typical user activity is more random and accesses smaller files, so doesn’t benefit as much. Most folk should look at 4KB Q1T1 performance numbers, not the “headline” SEQ Q1T1 numbers.
I’m still not completely sure about it, perhaps it’s a misprint, but in the manual that came with mine (same board) it lists both PCI-E and SATA drives in the Module Support List for the first slot. It then shows a slightly different list of SATA only drives for the second slot, which shares lanes with SATA3_3. It doesn’t say anything about SATA for the first slot other than the drives being listed with their respective interface.
Since it has 2 slots it is a rather moot point, just confusing.
M-keyed M.2 slots electrically support both PCIe and SATA drives. The BIOS determines whether those drives are recognised/mountable/addressable/accessible/bootable. Thus any particular M.2 slot can support either SATA drives, PCIe drives, or both — but it depends on the BIOS. What speeds can be achieved is ultimately limited by circuitry.
In this case M2_1 is hardwired to 4 dedicated/exclusive PCIe lanes, so installing a SATA drive in it would simply waste 3 lanes. Although it may be possible to put a SATA3 drive into M2_1, doing so just doesn’t make sense — it’d be like riding a scooter on the Autobahn. Maybe if you were upgrading an old motherboard and had a bunch of old SATA3 M.2 SSDs lying around… but that’s the only scenario I can think of where it could possibly make sense, and I don’t think that’s the OP’s situation. I think he’s already got something in M2_2 and is looking to populate M2_1 with something “appropriate”.
That is not entirely true. I’m not up to the current state on Intel, but thee AMD chipset PCIe lanes are 2.0. Which is rather annoying because most boards have a PCIe 3.0/SATA M.2 slot and then a secondary PCIe 2.0 M.2 slot without SATA support, so no fast + cheap SSD combo… but anyway, PCIe 2.0 is still used.
Correct, Gen2 lanes do exist on B450 motherboards, but you can’t plug M.2 SSDs into them — at least not without an adapter of some sort. However, the PCIe lanes that this thread is concerned about — the ones connected to M2_1 — go directly to the CPU, not the chipset.
I’m not aware of any current (AMD) motherboards that connect their one and only PCIe M.2 slot to the chipset. Come to think of it, I don’t think any of the previous generation motherboards did either. Ergo “Pretty-much all … are Gen3 nowadays”. Maybe a few years ago that might have happened, but it would be extremely rare in late-2018.
Really? Damn that’s news to me too… or do you mean as a boot drive? I always thought they could be used for SSDs, albeit with a significantly lower throughput.
You can’t physically plug a M.2 SSD (of any sort) into a PCIe slot. You need an M.2 » PCIe adapter to make the physical connection.
PCIE1/3/5/6 on B450 mobos are 1x Gen2 PCIe slots. That means that you are limited to about 500MB/s transfer rates — (a little bit) lower than pretty-much any SSD or SATA3 drive nowadays.
So yes, using an appropriate adapter card, you can connect either type of M.2 SSD to a free 1x PCIe slot. The drive will be bottlenecked by the 1x Gen2 lane that connects the slot to the chipset, so it doesn’t make sense to connect a NVMe drive here — save a bunch of cash and go SATA3.
The usability of the drive is determined by the BIOS. All major mobo vendors now fully support reading/writing M.2 drives in PCIe slots via adapters, but not all support booting (from adapted NVMe, specifically) — so you can definitely use them as data drives, but maybe not as boot drives. Motherboard manuals usually don’t state whether booting via an adapter is supported, because that involves third-party intermediary hardware that the motherboard manufacturer is not interested in validating.
That said, motherboard manuals do indicate whether or not you can boot from SSDs connected via onboard M.2 slots (e.g. page 5 of http://asrock.pc.cdn.bitgravity.com/Manual/B450%20Pro4.pdf).
Motherboard manuals often also describe what happens if you plug something into the second M.2 slot on your motherboard — which shares lanes with other slots. Often the utilisation of the second slot will disable one or two SATA ports, or downgrade/disable PCIE4 (the second graphics card PCIe slot).
So yeah, things can get a little confusing.
@mihawk90 was talking about Gen2 PCIe lanes. On your particular motherboard, your second M.2 slot (M2_2) shares a data lane with SATA3_3. It doesn’t use Gen2 PCIe lanes. Thus the discussion about Gen2 PCIe lanes is not directly relevant to you (unless you want more than two M.2 drives in your system, that is).
On an ASRock B450M Pro4:
Regular B450 motherboards are larger (than your micro-ATX B450M), have more PCIe slots, can fit more adapted M.2 drives, and have M.2 slots that deal with lanes differently. Some of the previous discussion/examples/links referred to the B450 and not the B450M. So whilst the principles are all the same, the specifics sometimes differ.
Oohh sorry my bad then, I should have specified. I was talking about 2 physical M.2 slots, one PCIe 3/SATA, and one PCIe 2. Of course that doesn’t apply on that specific board.
ah thanks for clearing that up for me, really appreciated
