Will two m.2 SSD decrease performance on ASUS Z370 Prime A?

[dipx07]

Hi, guys, now I am using one m.2 SSD Samsung Evo 960 with my ASUS Z370 Prime A. If I add another one SSD m.2 will it decrease the performance? Thanks

 

[tacgnol06]

It shouldn't. However, the motherboard shares it's M.2 lanes with some of the SATA ports. To quote the board's guru3D review "if you use the upper M2 slot then SATA1 will be disabled. For the 2nd M2 slot in use, it even means that port 5 and 6 are disabled."

Basically, if you go this route you'll only have 3 SATA ports to work with.

 

[TJ Hooker]

If you were were doing heavy read/write to both drives simultaneously, then the bandwidth to both drives individually would in theory be less than if you just had one drive. This is due to both M.2 slots being connected to the chipset, which in turn only has a PCIe 3.0 x4 connection to the CPU. In practice during normal usage, I doubt there'd be much if any noticeable impact to performance.