My motherboard comes with 4 m2 slots. I don't care about RAID but I very much care that my fastest m2 (990 pro) isn't being nerfed,
but this chart at the bottom is saying some jargon I just don't understand, do I need to understand it or can I just put my various M2 nvme drives (some fast, some super budget/slow) whereever I want?
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fe31nz:
You also need to know where the M.2 PCIe lanes connect to. Lanes connected to the CPU run at full speed always. Lanes connected to the chipset have to share the lanes between the CPU and the chipset, which is often only 4 lanes. So if you have two M.2 sockets with 4 lanes each on the chipset, when both M.2 devices are running, they will only run at half speed due to contention for use of the chipset to CPU lanes. And that is without any traffic from the CPU to other devices on the chipset (USB ports, for example). And it is also common for some M.2 sockets to use slower PCIe speeds. So on a CPU that does PCIe v5, typically the first M.2 socket only will run PCIe v5 and all the others will be PCIe v4 or even PCIe v3. A Samsung 990 Pro is a PCIe v4 device, so for full speed it needs to be on a CPU connected PCIe v4 M.2 socket. There is no harm in putting it on a PCIe v5 M.2 socket, but if you have both PCIe v4 and PCIe v5 sockets on the CPU, put it on the v4 one and leave the v5 one to add a much faster PCIe v5 M.2 device later.
Aha in that case I'll def connect the fast one to the M or Q slot then
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