[SOLVED] Will plugging an NVME M.2 drive into a PCIE slot via an adapter card disable SATA ports on my motherboard?

[por_favor_69]

Hi all,

So my current storage setup is as follows:

Gigabyte Z-170X Gaming 3 Motherboard
2x Kingston SV300S37A/240G SSDs Running in RAID 0 (These are standard SATA ssds plugged into the SATA ports on my motherboard)
Samsung 960 PRO 512 GB NVME SSD (Plugged into the M.2 Slot on my motherboard. This is my boot drive.)
Western Digital Green 2TB drive (SATA III)
Crucial P1 1TB M.2 NVME SSD (Plugged into the second M.2 Slot on my motherboard)

I introduced the Crucial drive yesterday only to find out that occupying that M.2 slot on the motherboard with a PCIE x4 drive actually disables all but two of my SATA ports. I need at least three total working SATA ports for my two SATA SSDs and the Hard Drive. I was going to just purchase a standalone SATA controller card and just plug the hard drive into that and be done with it. But after looking at the average price of one, (why are they so expensive?) I'm wondering if I could maybe just plug the Crucial P1 into one of those M.2 to PCIE adapter cards to avoid disabling the SATA ports? Or would that just yield the same result?

 

[popatim]

No, Install the card in the PCIEX4 slot.
PCIEx8 shares lanes with the GPU and will drop both of those slots to 8-lanes if you install a card into it.