Yes, you can fit two NVME drives on this motherboard.
Yes, you can fit two NVME drives on this motherboard.
Hi, I'm trying to figure out how many NVMe drives I can fit on my setup. I have an i7 6700K on the ASUS Z170 Pro Gaming board. Right now I have one RTX 2080 Ti in the top PCIe slot, two SATA SSDs, and a single NVMe M.2 SSD installed. I'm considering a PCIe to M.2 adapter from Umart (link provided) to add another NVMe drive. I want to know if it would still leave enough PCIe lanes for full-speed operation.
2080Ti receives its lanes straight from the CPU. The 6700K offers 16 PCI-E lanes for the GPU and the Z170 provides 20. On the Z170, both the M.2 port on the board and the second x16 slot (running at x4) pull their lanes from the chipset. You should be okay. Insert the adapter into the lower x16 slot because using the second x16 will activate x8/x8 mode.
For more details, see the ASUS pages linked above.
Regarding the extra cost for another NVMe drive—your question is clear.
It might not count as an expense if they already own it, and keeping it as a backup for the first one could be wise. Otherwise, it seems like a poor choice unless it’s fully utilized as a scratch disk or cache for hard drives. I haven’t used an SSD as a cache before, so I don’t have experience assessing whether a failure would affect data on the HDDs.
I work with Substance Painter and Unreal Engine 4 which slow down file saving and loading on SATA SSDs. On my NVMe drive it runs much quicker—about 5 seconds for saves compared to 50-60 seconds on the SATA SSD. In the task manager I notice Substance Painter uses around 400 MB/s on SATA versus roughly 2.5GB/s on NVMe, confirming the bottleneck. Substance Painter auto-saves every ten minutes, highlighting the time lost waiting. Currently I run my operating system on the first SATA SSD, but I use the other two SATA drives and the NVMe SSDs for project caching, which helps a lot with NVMe speed. Now I’m considering swapping the first SATA SSD for an NVMe one as the OS drive. There’s also a sale nearby where NVMe SSDs are priced similarly to SATA ones at the same capacity—buying an NVMe would make sense. Edited May 17, 2020 by ApolloFury