M.2 SSD Adapters & Enclosures

Greetings! Just a point of correction that, as some have commented below, there are now a few motherboards with PCIe 5.0 slots. My mistake. But it makes no difference to the content of this video.

A PCIe adapter for NVMe ssd is an obvious choice.

Why do i see some drives for sale that says” nvme m.2 ssd ? “ I thought m.2 and nvme are different??

Very clear explanation! You can't always tell if something will work the way it should do unless you test it. For instance, a PCIe NVME 4x adapter is only recognised on the system sometimes until you restart it, where the mSATA drive works every time but causing the hard disk drive light to constantly stay on instead of showing when it's being accessed. The solution could be to connect it to the remaining SATA 3 socket, which could work faster as so it's not connected to SATA 2 by default. NVME drives use the same technology as a GPU via PCIe, thereby communicating directly with the CPU as opposed to a hard disk drive interface. Everyday use would appear the same in speed, unless booting into the operating system.

great explanation

Thank you very much because a lot of focus is on ways to do it this you know all the ways accessible to employ this in a system for example I have been wasting my time trying to figure out how I can explained my brothers 250gb HDD dell he games on 😮 Thanks to you my headaches short lived 😂 new sub 👍✅

Thanks again for another great video! Just bought a glow trends adapter too!

Why not test a gen4 adapter to a gen4 pcie motherboard?

The only question I was left with was can you boot from one of these drives if it was installed on a card in a PCI slit as shown here?

great video nice explanation

You explained this very well

Another amazing, informative video. Thank you!

Great!! Thank you

PCIE 4 slot fitted NVME (gen4) will be hotplate and with the help of decent heatsink it may hover around (50-80 degree Celsius while Gen3 is well under 40-70 Celsius) and PCIE 5 NVME in PCIE 5 will be oven itself and required well designed almunium or copper external heatsink, otherwise thermal throttling over 80 degrees will be happened.

At first I thought "this guy's a bit weird". But then he made sense. And continued to make sense throughout the video... I bet my ass, he's an IT teacher (retired or active). In any case, I learned something new, and he's worth paying attention to.

I think I saw a video using a Linux Mint USB to run Linux and then using terminal Duplicate Disk Command to clone OS drives...does that sound right? It would be good to have a refresher on that as I'm anxious of Terminal tbh

Do I need to configure this in bios to work? I'm too scared to play with the bios. I need more storage but I already got 2 m.2 2tb in my slots I was thinking to get m.2 to pcie adapter.

My motherboard is msi pro b760m-a ddr4 wifi

My tiny brain struggles to fathom the speeds of writing 3GB/s. That is insanely fast. I also have that exact same Orico external enclosure model, but mine is black.

I remember the days when you could show off your computer if you had some fancy casette recorder to load some sophisticated computer programs to the console. Squeek squeek krrrr fwiiee, fwiee krrrr fwiiiit.

Yes, the adaptor cards will allow you to mount an M.2 PCIe card into your system, but you may get a frustrating surprise when you find out your older system's BIOS was written pre-NVMe and won't see your card. This is especially frustrating if you wanted to use the M.2 as your boot drive. I suppose these cards are most useful for a newer system which already has an M.2 slot and the BIOS will properly identify it.

Best demonstration and explanation on the internet. Thank you for making this video!

Learn so much. Tnx a lot

Wow. I knew about nigh all of this before watching, but this is by far the best video on the internet for explaining such a matter. Keep it up!

Thermal throttling was a very big issue for these devices because the heatsink is simply too small to disperse heat away quick enough. I decide to try the PCi-e Gen4 X16 add in card by Asus whereas four nvme's can be installed and poof, no thermal throttling. I am now able to transfer huge files at 4.2GB/s all day long if necessary. Cheers from Texas!

can you do a video about the adapter cards for running an eGPU

Excellently presented excellent information!

hello i want to do the same but somehow my disc manager cant detect the m.2 ssd!

I have a pcie 16x adapter and a gaming msi mainboard with an i5 4670k.

i updated the bios so i can run 2800mhz ddr3 ram so it should be able to detect the pcie adapter and SSD.

my pc has 2x pcie 16x lanes. One is used by my graphics card and the other one is used by the x16 adapter with ssd.

but no matter what i do, the ssd is not recogniced.

do i have to download any other software for this to work or is the ssd broken (its an older one i got for free from an asus rog gaming laptop)

PCIe Gen 4x4, M.2 work on PCIe 3.0 slot ? gen 3 vs gen 4 have same dimensions/number of pins/etc . Single differences are about slot max capacity , soo gen 4 of 5-6 Gb/s will work only at 50 % because PCIe 3.0 slot is limited at 4 Gb/s or PC explode ?!?! :))

Thank You, super handy

Excellent Video , i have a MSI B-550 Pro board . The motherboard has M.2 slots . A 4.0 next to the CPU and the other M.2 slot is 3.0 . I bought a Samsung 2TB EVO 990 Pro Gen 4 m.2 drive . I ran the benchmark and my read / write speeds where 3.0 speeds which is about half the gen four speed. Oh well there is not much I can do. I damaged my other board and B-550 board was a cheap replacement. The rub is ,you can't hardly buy the gen 3 's anymore on places like Amazon, B & H.

super clear explanation, probably the best and clearest I've seen :D

The m.2 enclosures are junk. I am on my fourth one. They just die and that sucks. Big waste of money.

So what can you use for os7 ?

Thanks for information sir. But can I use sata and nvme on these pci adapters or I have need to buy separate adapter for nvme Or sata?

Some NVME Samsung drives works with Windows 7. For some models Samsung released drivers. For example for your 970 EVO

Just for clarification, when using a heat sink, leave the M. 2 Labels or remove them, even loosing wareanty

High value content, very good presentation

Hi Chris, congrats for another good video.
Question: When connecting these drives by pci card, do they appear in Bios? Are they Bootable?

Two thumbs up - basically everything you ever wanted to know about M.2 in one video.

So Windows 7 and lower doesn't support M.2 NVM SSDs. That means they won't show up as drives on PC right? Bummer.

Is the sata m.2 ssds supported on Win7 and lower? I was hoping to use these as extra storage.

Dont buy them there way overpriced cost of production with no chip cost less then 2 usd ....they sell them for over 10 its daylight robbery

Great video, thanks for good explanation of USB3+ standards and the good demonstration with a speed tests. It keeps me updated.

👍👍👍👍👍

My enclosure has a switch inside to swith between nvme & pcie I believe 🤔

I love the pace and clarity of the explanation. Thank you for this.

love your videos - didn't know nvme is only useable on win8 and above - I was about to consider purchasing one for my win7 gaming rig but after watching and learning from you I see it's useless until I move out to Linux (I'm not a fan of win10-11 idea of privacy ...)

Funny, i actually have that 4x pcie adapter. in the computer i'm typing this on right now! It is indeed fast, even though it runs pcie gen 3 via the chipset.