Taichi x370 M.2 drive confusion

I'm a little confused and I'm hoping someone here can straighten me out. Please bear with me. I built this machine, then immediately took ill and spent 9 months in a hospital and rehab. I'm no longer entirely sure what my thought process was when building it, and I'm only just getting around to needing to upgrade it.

The Taichi has 2 M.2 slots, labeled in the manual as M2_1 (closest to the CPU), and M2_2 (closest to bottom of board & Dr. Debug). I have a Samsung 960 EVO Series - 250GB PCIe NVMe, which in the m2_2 slot being used as my boot drive.

I'm interested in buying another M.2 SSD, so I've been digging in the manual, but I'm finding it unclear. I'm really confused.

1. Which slot is designed for the NVMe drive, M2_1, or M2_2? From the manual, it looks like it's M2_1, but my 960 EVO is plugged into the M2_2 slot. This is messing with my head. . . is it possible to plug an NVMe drive into a non-NVMe slot, and have it work?

2. Once I get question #1 sorted, I would like to know if adding a second M.2 drive will slow down the first M.2 drive. I know that one M.2 drive is going to have a slower interface, but I thought I read that using both M.2 slots slows down the faster NVMe drive.


Here is a link showing the M.2 drive I'm currently using:
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-960-EVO-Internal-MZ-V6E250BW/dp/B01LYFKX41

I appreciate your help, and thank you for your time.

Thanks for the reply.

OK, Both slots handle NVMe, that explains why my SSD was working in the m2_2 slot. Going back over the manual, it looks like the m2_2 slot is slower than the M2_1 slot.

"(M2_2) supports M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen2x4 (20Gb/s)."

"(M2_1) supports SATA3 6.0Gb/s module and M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4(32Gb/s)"


M2_2 being slower confused me and made me think it wasn't NVMe. It is, it's just slower.


Using M2_2 disables PCI-e 5 slot. OK, I understand that.

** Is it also true that using M2_1 disables PCI-e 4? I think this is the case, but I wanted to verify it. **


Thanks for the help. I'm starting to get a handle on things.

Yeah, it has occurred to me that I should have put my boot drive in the m2_1 slot for the greater speed, but it seems like more trouble than it's worth to fix it now. Oh well. :(


> "M2_2 should not disable PCIe4 slot, it will disable the last slot right at the bottom of the motherboard."


I feel like we're mixing our M2 slots now. M2_2 (m2_two) disables the PCI-e 5 slot. You said that above, and the manual backs you up.


I was asking about m2_1 (m2_one). The manual says M2_1 disables PCI-e 4, so I guess it does, but I wasn't expecting to give up a slot for each M.2 drive I install. It seems like trading off a PCI-e slot for every m.2 drive is a steep cost.


I think this is the last thing I need verified.

Yeah, aside from that one mention in the manual, I've not seen anything about each M.2 drives disabling a PCI-e port. Not in reviews or anywhere.


Thanks again for the help.

> "the top nvme slot connects directly with the cpu the lower one goes via the chipset
> as said above swap it into top slot is best advice"

** Can I just physically move my boot drive from M2_2 to M2_1, turn on the computer and have it work? **

Or, do I have to format & reinstall, or copy it to a new NVMe in the top slot? If I buy another NVMe drive, it's gonna be about a terabyte, and I want it for games. I don't want to partition that up for my boot drive.

If I can just pull the current NVMe drive from the m2_2 slot and put it in the m2_1 slot, I might do that. Otherwise, I'm not doing a format/reinstall.

I was thinking of buying a regular SSD and a large HDD, as storage is running low, but I already have a collection of small SSD's and HDD's in my machine. Seven SSD slots are already in use, and when you go beyond eight, the last two SSD slots are funky kludges that are slower and share the same bandwidth.

I got to thinking and remembered I still had a free NVMe slot, and that started to look appealing in this situation, and so here I am.