Question Second NVMe drive on B450 Fatal1ty

[Shizerowski]

Hi!

Recently I bought NVMe drive to put it in my second M.2 slot in the ASRock B450 Fatal1ty Gaming K4 motherboard, but it refused to show up in bios or windows.

My components:

AMD Ryzen 7 5800x

ASRock B450 Fatal1ty Gaming K4

2x8GB ADATA 3200MHz CL16 XPG Gammix D30

MSI Ventus RTX 3070Ti

Corsair Rm750x

I have ADATA SX8200 Pro 512Gb as my boot drive in Ultra M.2 Slot and I wanted to install ADATA Legend 710 1Tb which is PCI 3.0x4 in second M.2 slot for games and other files.

Unfortunately, I haven't checked the manual of this motherboard carefully enough, because there is information that the second slot only works in PCI 3.0x2 or SATA instead of PCI 3.0x4 as my new drive.

Is there any option to make it work only on 2 PCIe lines instead of 4? Or do I need to buy PCI 3.0x2 drive or a SATA m.2 one?

 

[Lutfij]

Welcome to the forums, newcomer!

The slots are wired from the factory by the board makers, if the maximum supported by the second, lower slot is PCIe 3.0x 2, that's the highest it'll go. If you changed the motherboard, with one that had 2xPCIe 3.0x4 or PCIe 4.0x4 slots, that's another scenario.

 

[Shizerowski]

Thanks for your answer, but I wanted to know if I can somehow make it work on just 2 PCI-E lines, I understand that it will be slower but this motherboard doesn't recognize it at all, despite of information mentioned on their website which is
"The speed of PCIE Gen3x4 M.2 SSDs can only reach to Gen3x2 when plugging in M2_2 slot. "

 

[Math Geek]

specs say "*M2_2, SATA3_3 and SATA3_4 share lanes. If either one of them is in use, the others will be disabled. "

do you happen to have anything in either of those sata ports? if so, then the second m.2 slot is disabled until you disconnect whatever is in those ports.

the m.2 slot will run at 3.0 x2 even if it is an x4 drive. it'll just have half the bandwidth as it can handle. no need for a special nvme drive.

 

[Shizerowski]

I disconnected all SATA devices and still, it hasn't appeared anywhere.

 

[Bob.B]

I disconnected all SATA devices and still, it hasn't appeared anywhere.

Swap m.2 slots....test.

 

[Math Geek]

does the drive show up in bios?

if not, then remove the drive and try seating it again.