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hard drive upgrade

spooks
Level 7
Hi I'm looking for some advise I have a ASUS strix Z270e gaming motherboard with a i7 7700K cpu I was thinking about upgrading my internal Samsung SSD hard drive which is almost full and was wondering what would be the best to upgrade to another bigger SSD hard drive or a M.2 internal SSD and what is the difference between a M.2_1 M.2_2 and what one to get that would fit my motherboard . I’ve been told they are faster and better than normal SSD hard drives
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world
Moderator
Hey Spooks,

If you're currently using an SSD that's connected by SATA cable, an M.2 NVME rive will a a ton faster. I definitely strongly recommend having an M.2 NVME drive if you don't have one!

According to the user manual, this is the key difference between the M.2_1 and M.2_2 ports:
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spooks
Level 7
thanks for the advise do you happen to know which make and model would work with my motherbord

NVMe drives are kinda like SATA drives in terms of broad general compatibility. Your board is PCIe 3.0, so you only need 3.0 performance. You can install a 4.0 drive if you want, but it will run in 3.0 mode/speed. Any NVMe 3.0 x4 drive from a reputable brand should work well. For a desktop system, you typically use 2280 drives (22mm wide x 80mm long), and M key (refers to the position of the slot cut in the edge connector).

Personally, for a PCIe 3.0 system, I would go for a Seagate Firecuda 510 or a WD_BLACK SN750, or they both have more budget oriented drives if those performance gaming models are more than you want to spend. Samsung also have an extremely good rep for SSDs, and their 970 NVMe drives are high performing 3.0 units. Crucial are worth a look too, since Micron make the actual silicon. There are many others out there, there's a huge choice when it comes to NVMe drives. I have a bias towards the traditional storage vendors like Seagate and WD, but that's just me.

NVMe 3.0 x4 slots are up to 4 GB/s, and typical high performance 3.0 NVMe drives are somewhere in the 3000 MB/s and above range, with more general ones in the 1000 MB/s upwards range. Just about any good NVMe drive that's being sold today will be a big improvement over SATA, which is up to 6 Gb/s / 600 MB/s (it's a 10 bit code for 8 bits of data).

Edit: also you'll find both NVMe and PCIe used to describe them. NVMe is essentially a special type of PCIe for non-volatile memory storage.