Howdy folks!
I'm still running my older desktop which I put together in 2015. It does everything I need it to so I don't really want to drop $ just yet on a new build. But it wouldn't ever hurt to have it running at top-speed. ;)
A little while back, I went ahead and purchased the 970 EVO M.2, on a deal, thinking I might use it later. Afterwards, I remembered I had an adapter which lets you plug an M.2 into a PCIe slot to run a drive when your motherboard doesn't have M.2 natively.
Query is: is there any speed-gain doing this?
Board is the ASRock H97M-ITX/ac. According to Samsung, the 970 is using PCIe 3.0, same as the adapter…
Would like to hear from anyone who has tried this, and their outcome.
Ta!
M.2 comes in two flavours - M.2 NVME, and M.2 SATA., and M.2 NVME is much faster than M.2 SATA. Now, PCIe is actually the same interface as M.2 NVME - and operates at the same speed, it is just in a different physical package.
The Samsung 970 is M.2 NVME.
PCIe NVME adapter are essentially just passive physical connector adapters - the M.2 NVME drive still talks at full speed with the computer.
PCIe M.2 SATA adapters are different, and they do contain a SATA to PCIe bridge chip, and will still operate with the bottleneck of the SATA interface.
Now, there are exceptions regarding PCIe lanes… but the above will be true for most cases.