Question Secondary M.2 slowing my system?

[reignman]

I have a M.2 as my primary drive for boot and a second HDD for storage, i want to add a secondary M.2 Drive

Does having a second M.2 drive slow my system or GPU?, i know this depends on the motherboard and the use of lanes, i am not an expert so i am posting the system i have trying to know if this could affect performance on my current configuration. I've read slso my second M.2 wont be as fast as the primary as it communicates from CPU not chipset.

System

MSI PRO Z790-P (Motherboard)
Intel® Core™ i7-13700F (Processor)
Kingston Fury Beast 32GB 5200MHz DDR5 (Memory)
GeForce RTX 4060 Ti (Graphic Card)
XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE PCIe Gen4x4 M.2 (Boot drive)
Seagate BarraCuda 4TB Internal Hard Drive HDD (Second hard drive)

My motherboard mention this about M.2 Slots:

∙ 4x M.2 slots (Key M)
• M2_1 slot (From CPU)
• Supports up to PCIe 4.0 x4
• Supports 2242/ 2260/ 2280/ 22110 storage devices

• M2_2 slot (From Z790 chipset)
• Supports up to PCIe 4.0 x4
• Supports 2242/ 2260/ 2280 storage devices

• M2_3 slot (From Z790 chipset)
• Supports up to PCIe 4.0 x4
• Supports SATA 6Gb/s
• Supports 2242/ 2260/ 2280 storage devices

• M2_4 slot (From Z790 chipset)
• Supports up to PCIe 4.0 x4
• Supports SATA 6Gb/s
• Supports 2242/ 2260/ 2280 storage devices

Thanks in advance

 

[bill001g]

It likely will work fine.

I did not look up your motherboard but it likely have 16 pcie lanes dedicated from the cpu to the first slot you the gpu in. This means it doesn't matter what you put in the other slots the gpu will still have its 16.

Now lets pretend the motherboard that somehow can split the cpu lanes 8x8. It still will not affect you because unlike many higher end video cards yours can only use 8 lanes even when the motherboard has 16.

There will be a slight difference between a ssd in the direct cpu slot and the chipset slot. Maybe if you get lucky you can see it with some benchmark program but in actual usage the pcie is still lots faster than the SSD so the SSD will still be the main limiting factor.