Question Crucial MX500 M.2 Sata SSD to NVMe - is it possible?

[Wouter Bovelander]

Hi,

Wanting to upgrade from my old hard disk to something faster, I purchased the Crucial MX500 M.2 (m-key) 1Tb Sata SSD drive. Not knowing any better I also purchased an M.2 to PCIe adapter board so that I could actually fit my new M.2 drive onto my motherboard. This doesn't work. The Crucial MX500 has a Sata SSD interface and the adapter board does not support Sata SSD, only drives with NVMe and AHCI interfaces.

Is there a way to convert my MX500 Sata SSD to PCIe NVMe or AHCI? Theoretically I assume this should be possible, because Sata is much slower than the others. But all I can find is adapter boards that convert M.2 NVMe/AHCI to PCIe.

Thanks.

 

[Lutfij]

Your drive will populate the .2 slot on your board and in BIOS you simply set the Storage controller to AHCI, although that should already be there/enable by default.

Mind sharing the specs to your system like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:

Also link the part you ordered without consultation.

 

[mdd1963]

The adapter board is for NVME drives only.

The M.2 SATA drive (which is literally identically as fast as a standard SATA 2.5 " SSD) will require a compatible M.2 slot that works with SATA drives...

Really no easy choices there, short of selling both parts and getting what you need... (Many 2 yrs or newer mainboards have a pair of M.2 slots, where, reasonably often, one usually works with an M.2 SATA drive...)

(What mainboard do you have? I'd hate to see you then go get an NVME drive for a computer to old to boot from it....)

 

[SkyNetRising]

The choice is pretty easy actually.
M.2 to sata adapter. You connect is as ordinary 2.5" sata drive. It supports sata M.2 drives only (M.2 NVME is not supported on this).

 

[Wouter Bovelander]

The choice is pretty easy actually.
M.2 to sata adapter. You connect is as ordinary 2.5" sata drive. It supports sata M.2 drives only (M.2 NVME is not supported on this).

Thanks. This is what I used to get it to work in the end. I never realised my Crucial MX500 was Sata only, though.

 

[Wouter Bovelander]

The adapter board is for NVME drives only.

The M.2 SATA drive (which is literally identically as fast as a standard SATA 2.5 " SSD) will require a compatible M.2 slot that works with SATA drives...

Really no easy choices there, short of selling both parts and getting what you need... (Many 2 yrs or newer mainboards have a pair of M.2 slots, where, reasonably often, one usually works with an M.2 SATA drive...)

(What mainboard do you have? I'd hate to see you then go get an NVME drive for a computer to old to boot from it....)

Thank you. Yes, you're right. I found a little converter board for M.2 to Sata which at least works.

The mainboard I'm using now is the ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0. I'm not even sure now if that will support NVME drives.

 

[Wouter Bovelander]

Your drive will populate the .2 slot on your board and in BIOS you simply set the Storage controller to AHCI, although that should already be there/enable by default.

Mind sharing the specs to your system like so:
CPU:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:

Also link the part you ordered without consultation.

Almost. My main board (ASRock 970 Pro3 rev2.0) doesn't have an m.2 slot. This is why I figured I could simply convert any M.2 drive to PCIe. Of course now I know I can't. My Crucial MX500 is just an M.2 shaped Sata SSD which will only work as a Sata drive.
Thanks for your input.