How To Add, Install & Configure Extra M.2 NVME Drive Slots To A PC

hi this is mike from microsoft reviews and how to and on today's video i'm going to show you how to add an additional m.2 port to your pc to add in more nvme drives keep watching find out more [Applause] okay so in today's video we'll be taking a look at how to add an additional m.2 port to your pc now this example we've got this micro atx motherboard and as you can easily see there is an m.2 slot there that is essentially it so we've only got one m.2 slot so you can put in one drive absolutely fine but then if you want to add some other expansion further down the line you don't want to be using your sata ports you want to use the new faster and often more cost-effective nvme based drives then you're going to need some way of adapting the system now it's really handy easy diy and many other companies have actually produced a very simple and elegant solution so you can add an additional drive to your system by using one of your unused pci express ports now in this particular instance we'll be using this particular port here so this is our pci express gen 3 x 16 slot now there is one slight caveat to these type of devices they do require a specific amount of bandwidth in order for them to function so they do require pci express gen 3 x 4 sized slots so unfortunately you can't use the pc express times one slots like these the smaller ones you have to use a times four slot and most motherboards these days don't actually have a times four slot it's normally disguised in a times 16 size slot such as this one but it's only actually wired electrically for maybe times eight which would be kind of halfway or times four which is kind of just past here which is what we're going to be trying to use so let's take a look at the actual pcr express adapter and you get a better idea of what we're talking about so this is the actual kit there will be some affinity links in the video description below if you want to pick one of these up various different companies do them isn't just easy diy there's absolutely tons of them the reason i went for this one is because this one actually is pretty flexible so we get included a screwdriver for attaching the drives which is really handy and also what you get in here this one is a half height slot adapter so if you're using this in a small form factor pc then this is going to be absolutely great so you can exchange the standard back plate from the pci express port and replace it with this half height one so looking at the actual adapter itself as you can see it's a pretty standard affair again another reason why i chose this one is because it's essentially all blacked out so we've got the nice black tape blanking plate on the back so it's going to look a little bit nice it's not going to stick out like a sore thumb with maybe a green pcb and a chrome backplate which would look a little bit naff most people probably won't see it so if you do want to get a cheaper version of this you can get one for roughly half the price again we'll put links for that in the video description that'll cost you some of the reason about seven or eight pounds here in the uk this particular one is about 14 pounds so a bit of a difference in price but i think for me personally the aesthetics of it do make a difference so let's take a look at the actual card as you can see we've got our m.2 port which is situated here and this will support various size drives as well up to some of the longest ones on the market it comes as standard with the fix-ins actually installed in the 2280 style which is pretty much what most modern drives tend to be and one thing you do need to look out for this is this will not support ssd sata based drives this is purely for nvme based drives so this is going to work with the m key drives but not the b key drives i'll try and put some close-ups on the screen now so you can see the difference but essentially as long as your drive is a nvme or a m.2 pci express drive you should be absolutely fine again if you've got any problems questions or queries feel free to let me know in the comments section below so going back to the card itself there are a few other bits and pieces on here that may be of interest to you in the description on amazon and places like that they often show with some leds actually incorporated on the back there so like a power on led and a drive activity led on this particular version it's actually being switched around to the kind of inner side there so you you are going to have a couple of leds on there we'll find out a little bit later how bright they actually are looking at the connectivity for the car so as you can see we've got this blue protective cover on here over the pco express fingers and you can just pull that off and then that exposes the fingers and the gold contacts so this will fit into your motherboard again most of you are probably looking at this thinking surely that i've got a pc express times one slot so let's try that out and see how that works out for us so on the board this is a pci express times one slot and if we try and line it up and you can see physically the slot actually overhangs so you can't put a larger card into a smaller slot but you can do vice versa so if you've got a larger slot such as this one the pc express time 16 side slot then that will go in easily and there we go and as you can see hopefully from some of the close-ups it's actually only making contact with the first few pins at the start there and the rest of it isn't connected so this is perfect for amd ryzen based systems where we've got a lot of pci express generation sharing throughout the motherboard so if you have a board which has two 16 size slots the bottom one generally will only be wired for maybe by eight or by four times so this is going to be absolutely fine you don't need that full connection across the entire slot okay so let's go ahead now and show you how this will work so this is the drive we're going to be using this is a silicon power pc express gen three times four drive which is the maximum that this card can actually support so there is a bandwidth limitation pizza express gen 3 times four so that's going to give you up to four gig transfers best case scenario but most of these drives will be limited to around about three and a half on the read and about three for the right so let's take the drive out of the packaging and as you can see you can see the fingers actually on the drive itself so this is what is called a b key so there's only one tiny little slot in there so if i show you the difference between this and a sata drive this is a sata drive and as you can see we've got two lines in there so these type of drives physically won't fit and will not work because they're not designed to work with this kind of interface so you do have to make sure that you're using one like this with a single indentation just on the fingers there so what we're going to need to do is to remove the screw here you can also as well obviously line up the drive the fingers there with whereabouts roughly your mounting is going to be so this as you can see is going to be a 2280 drive but you can undo the screw and the bolt underneath and move it to the respective places actually on the board so if you've got a very small possibly even a wi-fi card you could put it in this section here some of the new style drives actually are very small so you may need to move that but for our particular instance we're going to be absolutely fine so all we need to do is just unscrew this tiny little m.2 screw and we'll put that to the side for now now we can get our drive and with these drives you put it in fingers first and on slight angle so slightly up at the back and just give it a little wiggle and then you'll find that the fingers actually disappear inside there then you can hold down the drive itself and get the screw get it into place with these screws if you unscrew a couple of times for a soil click and kind of fill this in place so you have to over tighten it just make sure that the drive isn't isn't loose in there let's go another little turn there we go so that is the drive in in the actual unit now that is essentially all we need to do all we need to do now is to physically install that into the pc which we'll go ahead and do now so you can see how that's done and then we'll fire up the pc and show you how to initialize the drive if it isn't and drive which has already been used okay so the first thing you're going to want to do is to remove one of the pci express blanking plates now as you can see here i've actually removed the graphics card from the top slot there just to allow a little bit more light in so we can see what's going on so we're going to be using this particular slot here which is our time 16 side slot but as you can see it's only wired for by eight at the maximum so by four is gonna be absolutely fine for our needs so we're gonna go ahead and move this pci express braking plate just here take out the screw and then we can remove the pco express blanking plate put that to one side because we'll be needing that shortly so the next part is to get our m.2 drive on our pc express and then just line it up and put it in as you would any other card so what you do is line it up on the back there and push in and just make sure that's all lined up so that's absolutely fine now you can if you want to with these cards i know that some of you are going to be site they're saying but you can see the pcb all that kind of stuff you can if you want to actually go around the outside edge with a sharpie pen which will actually disguise the card a lot so you just go along the outside edge there with a sharpie and you can black that out so it won't be there at all and also because the distance we've got here this isn't going to impede airflow too much for the graphics card but obviously do take that into consideration if you've got a triple height graphics card or your secondary slot is a little bit too close to the graphics card obviously you don't want to impede your graphics card if you can possibly help it but essentially that is it for the installation so let's go over to windows now and we'll take a look at how to actually initialize our new drive okay so we turned the pc on there after installing our new pci express expansion port for the m.2 so as we go into disk management if you're not too sure how to do that this is actually on windows 11. we need to do is right click on the start flag and go into disk management this will bring you up the disk management icon or panel as you can see here and now we've got our main disk which is disk zero so that is our main drive and the new drive we've put in here says disk one unknown and it's not initialized so we're showing the full space there but it won't appear in windows because it's not been initialized so so what we're going to do is click on not initialized or click on where it says unknown right click and choose initialize disk and then we'll get the disk wizard come up so you can choose here wherever you want it to be mbr or gpt for your partition tables if this is a modern version then i would go with gpt mbr radius for older drives now so let's go with gpt i'll click ok so now the drive is online but still unallocated so now we can go into the drive right click and we'll choose new simple volume and this is the new simple volume wizard so we'll click on next you can choose the disk space so if you want a full drive no partitions you can just go ahead and choose the whole size of the drive there if you want to make partitions obviously choose a volume size which is slightly smaller all that kind of stuff so anyway we'll go with full size we'll click on next and you can assign a drive letter so we'll call this drive letter d because our main drive is c and you can choose the file format obviously if you're using this in windows then ntfs is the ideal way to go uh you can if you want to use exfat but ncfs is probably the best thing to go for and at this time you can choose a volume labels if you want to you could put in something like games whatever you want to do i'm just going to leave that blank so also perform a quick format i would probably not advise enable filing forwarder compression at this time you will get better performance without it so that is fine so we'll click on next and it goes through and gives you an idea of what you're actually going to be doing click finish and hopefully within a few seconds there we go there is our new local disc d our new flash drive all ready to go so i think we probably need to do a speed test on this drive to see how it works so i'm going to go ahead and quickly download some tools to do that and then we'll be straight back okay there we go just done a quick test in crystal disk mark for this particular drive and actually on the silicon power specs this drive is capable of 2200 by 1600 or 2200 by 1700 that kind of thing so it is exactly where it should be in terms of speed wise so we haven't had any restrictions at all on the pc express bus on this particular drive so yeah really happy it's worked as intended and is possibly prevented me getting another motherboard so yeah excellent well done like it a lot so there we go there are the uh installation done we've formatted the drive and also done a quick test to make sure it's performing as it should do and it's performing exactly within specifications so really happy with that this is a great little tool if you want to add an extra m.2 drive to your system now obviously on a lot of systems especially rising based systems you may have to play the uh the pci express bandwidth juggle game depending on your setup so yeah the pc express on some b550 b450 etc boards can be a little bit precarious because of the bifurcation of the different lanes but again if you want more explanation of that do reach out in the comments section below if you're on x 570 board or x 470 it should be absolutely fine but again do check make sure that you've got enough pso express bandwidth for the particular drives you're trying to install now of course this isn't where it ends this is just a single drive version there are lots of other options available so there's ones with dual drives as well also ones that come with heatsinks as well also so if you want to keep the drives a little bit cooler then that is definitely an option as well so there's loads and loads of options from starting from like seven pounds for the very basic uh relatively ugly pcb with that silver backplate which again we'll link in the video description up to kind of like the uh the dual drive ones with heatsinks all that kind of stuff built in so you really can choose pretty much what is suitable for you but i think for a lot of people maybe if you're into video editing you want to have maybe that separate nvme drive for your footage to prevent lagging and adobe premiere that kind of thing or maybe you want to have a setup where you've got maybe your c drive with windows your d drive with your games and maybe your e drive for something else all together then this is actually a really good option and certainly may save you having to actually shut out for another motherboard so for those with with older boards such as b350 b450 boards even something like this a520 could be an absolute lifesaver so let me know what you think about this one in the comment section below in the meantime i've been mike this is my unboxing reviews and how to and hopefully we'll catch you in the very next video thanks for watching [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Mike's unboxing, reviews and how to

Views: 83,002

Keywords: mikesunboxing, unboxing, install m.2, how to install m.2 ssd, how to, nvme ssd, m.2 drive, m.2 install desktop, nvme install desktop, pcie m.2 adapter card, m.2 pcie card, ez-diy m.2 card, add more m.2, add more m.2 slots, how to add more m.2 slots, install more m.2 slots, how to install more m.2 slots, install more nmve slots, install another m.2 slots, get more m.2 slots, install another m.2 slot, pcie, nvme, m.2, install, configure, setup, format, partition, m.2 drive not showing

Id: QgtEbQSv5s8

Length: 15min 5sec (905 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021