Setting up M.2 Drives Properly

[raminayou]

Hello all,

I purchased a Samsung 960 EVO M.2 250gb to use as my boot drive, and a Samsung 960 EVO M.2 500gb to use as my drive for everything else.

My board is an ASUS ROG Strix Z370-I Gaming mITX board with 2 M.2 connections.
(https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-Z370-I-GAMING/)

Is there anything I need to do to set these up properly? Would I use them as SATA, PCIE, RAID modes? As I said. 1 will be used for the boot, and the 2nd for all my documents.

I'm new to this as this is my first computer build. Is there anything I need to do to get these drives working properly to what I'd like to use them for?

Thank you!

 

[karenjoly]

The mainboard manual has useful information. The drives are PCIe drives with an M2 interface. The board has two M2 connectors and both support PCIe devices.
Look at the manual in particular for install directions.
It use to be that an M2 could take resources from SATA PCIe resources but I see no indication this chipset has such a limitation.

 

[Calvin7]

For boot drive:

You need only the M.2 drive to be the only storage drive connected.

Go into the bios, under the boot tab there is an option for CSM, make sure it is disabled.

Click on secure boot option below and make sure it is set to other OS, not windows UEFI.

Click on key management and clear secure boot keys.

Insert a USB memory stick with a bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup* on it, USB3 is quicker but USB2 works also. A Windows DVD won’t work unless you’ve created your own UEFI Bootable DVD.

Press F10 to save, exit and reboot.

Windows 10 will now start installing to your NVME drive as it has its own NVME driver built in.

When the PC reboots hit F2 to go back into the BIOS, you will see under boot priority that windows boot manager now lists your NVME drive.

Click on secure boot again but now set it to WIndows UEFI mode.

Click on key management and install default secure boot keys

Press F10 to save and exit and windows will finish the install. Once you have Windows up and running, shutdown the PC and reconnect your other SATA drives and other M.2 drive.

*How to create a bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup
https://winaero.com/blog/how-to-create-a-bootable-uefi-usb-drive-with-windows-10-setup/

 

[raminayou]

For boot drive:

You need only the M.2 drive to be the only storage drive connected.

Go into the bios, under the boot tab there is an option for CSM, make sure it is disabled.

Click on secure boot option below and make sure it is set to other OS, not windows UEFI.

Click on key management and clear secure boot keys.

Insert a USB memory stick with a bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup* on it, USB3 is quicker but USB2 works also. A Windows DVD won’t work unless you’ve created your own UEFI Bootable DVD.

Press F10 to save, exit and reboot.

Windows 10 will now start installing to your NVME drive as it has its own NVME driver built in.

When the PC reboots hit F2 to go back into the BIOS, you will see under boot priority that windows boot manager now lists your NVME drive.

Click on secure boot again but now set it to WIndows UEFI mode.

Click on key management and install default secure boot keys

Press F10 to save and exit and windows will finish the install. Once you have Windows up and running, shutdown the PC and reconnect your other SATA drives and other M.2 drive.

*How to create a bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup
https://winaero.com/blog/how-to-create-a-bootable-uefi-usb-drive-with-windows-10-setup/

So when you say "insert a USB memory stick with a bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup," I have a question about that too.

I went to the Windows 10 webpage titled "Download Windows 10 Disk Image (IOS File) - Windows. Create Windows 10 Installation Media." I downloaded the tool and went through all the steps and now my flash drive has Windows 10 setup.exe on it, ready to be plugged in to my new computer and be downloaded.
(https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10)

Would this work as my bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup?

And if what I did with my flash drive will work, I would still go through the rest of the steps you suggested to use 1 of my M.2 drives as my boot and my 2nd for my documents, right?

 

[Calvin7]

Once you have the ISO image file of Windows 10 you can go thru the steps in this link:
How to create a bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup
https://winaero.com/blog/how-to-create-a-bootable-uefi-usb-drive-with-windows-10-setup/

 

[raminayou]

Once you have the ISO image file of Windows 10 you can go thru the steps in this link:
How to create a bootable UEFI USB drive with Windows 10 Setup
https://winaero.com/blog/how-to-create-a-bootable-uefi-usb-drive-with-windows-10-setup/

Okay so just to make sure, even though I went to the "Download Windows 10" page and went though the Media Creation Tool to load Windows 10 on my flash drive, I still have to use Rufus after?

Because I read an article where it talked about 2 ways of creating a bootable UEFI USB Drive. Either through the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool (which is what I did), or through Rufus.
(https://www.windowscentral.com/how-create-windows-10-usb-bootable-media-uefi-support)