Gigabyte AX370 Gaming 5 M.2 question.

[ingeborgdot]

If I went with an NVME M.2 drive for my scratch/media cache, does anyone know if my board will support it? I have the M.2 slot already used for my OS and that is not going to change. Does my board support 2 at the NVME speed if I got an adapter and used a PCIe slot with an NVME M.2 drive? I can't seem to find any info on it right now.
I have the Gigabyte AX370 Gaming 5 board. I'm sure it will work but I don't know if it will be slower because of already using the M.2 lane? Does anyone know?

 

[eyupo92]

It works perfectly.

I have attached a second NVMe disk using Asus Hyper m.2 card; but any card should work. By default it runs on PCIe 3.0 x4 speed.

The speed however depends on a setting on BIOS hidden at an unrelated menu item. Under MIT, there is Miscelleanous Settings, and under it there is the setting called PCIe Slot Configuration.

This setting is by default set to Auto; so it will use whatever PCIe generation setting the connected device supports. However it has the following settings:

• 
  Auto
  Gen1
  Gen2
  Gen3

and ypu can set them manually if desired.

I have attached numerous NVMe disks - each with higher read thoughput than 2000 MB/s - using Asus card and then played with this setting and have seen that the disk speed changes when tested with CrystalDiskMark for all settings.

If you NVMe disk has a throughput rate lower than 2000 MB/s this, you might not see a difference between Gen2 and Gen3 setting; but it is worthwhile to check if it is set correctly ( at least as Auto ).

Hope it helps.