Question New to builds and need advice on storage and setup of a AMD/B450

[E85boosted]

Thanks for reading and hopefully helping to sort this out. I am new to building and just finished my first build.
I still am running into a few snags. The one I am currently on is my storage setup. I have a Asus B450 f motherboard. When building the computer I started with 500gb m.2 in the top slot and this was enough. I didn't know you should have a boot drive and a storage drive for games, so as of now I have filled the 500mb with everything. I added a second m.2 to the lower section of the motherboard. It is currently empty and after the fact I found out that it now runs my PCI at 8x instead of 16x. I do run the Asus Tuf 3080 and don't want to effect the speed so I plan to remove the M.2.
What would the best plan be? Save the second m.2 as a backup drive for boot and spend more money on a 1Tb ssd? Or go the route of adding a PCI expansion slot for the m.2? I am not sure if or how easy this is on a b450f motherboard. If anyone can help let me know
Build details- Ryzen 5 3600x, Asus B450f, Asus Tuf 3080, 2x Western Digital 500gb m.2

 

[tennis2]

SATA SSDs still exist....

Are you playing all the games you've got installed?

I presume you've got other things stored on the PC besides games (photos/videos/etc). These things are easy to offload even to an internal hard drive.

 

[E85boosted]

Yea Sata is the route I was thinking of going but I already have the second M.2 in hand. I know the b450 f has multiple PCI connections, I am just not sure how or If I can add a expansion card for the second m.2 into my second PCI slot without it effecting anything. I just found out the use of the second m.2 makes the first PCI run at 8x instead of x16. And yes unfortunately some of the games take a lot of space (call of duty is around 200mb alone). Outside of gaming its just used for basic stuff (online, some pics, research, mainly gaming)

 

[tennis2]

Just use both M.2s. PCIe 3.0 8x isn't going to hurt performance much.

You can even run your own benchmarks if you like. Run a few games before you install the second M.2 and record the FPS. Then test again with the second M.2. Less than 5% difference I bet.

 

[E85boosted]

I was reading that with the 3080 running it on the x8 vs the x16 could be up to 10% loss. I just hate to waste money on another sata instead of the M.2 but also dont want to sacrifice a good bit of performance. Im looking more into the difference in performance now. I hope it really doesn't change that much because just running them the way they are is defiantly the easiest solution

 

[E85boosted]

Guess it really comes to weighing the benefits to spending more and getting the 16x for the 3080 or saving the money and getting the 8x which shouldn't change the fps much in game....