M2 SSD

KillerK10wn wrote:

Is there a newer list of compatible M2 SSD's ? I have the Z270M Pro4 and your web site is very limited. I am interested in a 1 TB. Does this board support PCI-Express 3.0 X 4 ?

Any M.2 NVMe SSD is compatible with any ASRock mother board for use as the OS/Windows drive, as long as the UEFI/BIOS supports NVMe. All ASRock Z170 and Z270 boards have NVMe support in the UEFI/BIOS. ASRock has NVMe support on many if not all of their X99 and Z97 chipset boards too.

Just as any SATA SSD or HDD is compatible with any mother board that has SATA support, the same is true for NVMe SSDs. The NVMe SSD compatibility list is simply the SSDs ASRock has in their lab for testing. Look at the compatibility list of SATA drives for your board or any other board. Does is list even 10% of the existing SATA drives? No, but would you be limit yourself to the SATA drives from the list? No need to do that for SATA or NVMe drives. The capacity of the drive does not matter for compatibility. Any SSD manufacture that designed a drive that needed specific support only for that drive would be making a big mistake.

I have NVMe SSDs like the Samsung 950 Pro and Intel 750 that are not on the compatibility list of the boards I use them with. They work perfectly as the OS drive, or simply as a storage drive. NVMe support in the UEFI/BIOS is only required for the SSD to be used as the OS drive. Otherwise it will work fine as a data drive.

Z170 and Z270 boards have the equivalent of a PCIe 3.0 x4 through the Z270 chipset. Your board has two Ultra M.2 slots that provides a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface via the chipset. My ASRock Z170 Extreme7+ has three Ultra M.2 slots via the Z170 chipset, that technology has existed for a while now. The only limitation is one Ultra M.2 slot shares resources with two SATA III ports, so when you use one of the Ultra M.2 slots, two SATA III ports will be usable.

You could also use a PCIe slot with an M.2 to PCIe adapter card for a PCIe 3.0 x4 M.2 SSD on Z170 and Z270 boards, but since the chipset provides the same interface, that is not necessary.

All of this information is shown in the Specification for your board:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z270M%20Pro4/index.asp#Specification