PCIe X1 and X4 to NVME SSD adapter cards review and install

hello So today we're going to I'm going to unbox this pcie X4 to m.2 card installing this WD sn530 drive and installing into this low form factor computer so let's see how it works I got this card for only five dollars and like seven cents it's right after I bought it jumped back up to 12. I will include a link in the description this card is pretty basic it just has X4 slot direct connection and it's got a little thermal barrier so that you can cool it this and it has a pass-through vent on the side of course you get a low profile racket that'll just fit right in there so let's get the SSD installed so what I've had to do here is just slide that spacer that empty ring and I'm hoping if I just screw that down it'll work and it did so the reviews of saying okay there's no way to do it there is you just have to slot it into that little notch and then it screws in on the back and it holds it down very very nice so I've gotten the low profile bracket installed now you can have the tiny the mid-range another mid-range and then the longer so you have old sizes of ssds can be put in here and of course I'll add in an ad go back and add a new thermal pad and then we'll just pop off this cover take out that bracket let's hope I'm installing this into the x16 slot that in there gun that in there it's just there we go that bracket is sticking out a little bit see yeah that's not gonna that's not gonna work as you can see it's sticking up like that so I gotta figure out what that problem is so I just did something about it being held down and it just has to pop into place you just have to push on it yeah and then now it's in place and uh it's working well so that is something to consider that you're gonna have to use some force and push that in there but now it's in it looks like it's probably gonna work so now we're gonna go down to boot menu okay oh boy oh no oh boy I cannot find it anywhere there is a USB hard drive what is the USB hard drive Maybe I don't have a USB hard drive in there so maybe it's thinking that this nvme drive is a USB hard drive I guess USB runs through the pcie bus so um nor changes and exit let's boot this up and check so we're in redhead Linux and that's what I have running on this 128 gigabyte SSD we're going to go to disks and a there it is pcsn30 so yeah all in all this adapter is very nice it's 12 on Amazon now but I got it for five there are cheaper ones there is a there's by fours that are for you know seven or eight dollars and there's also buy ones and it's not very hot so I have a storage device for this computer this is more likely going to go into my main computer and I'll be reviewing another adapter for that but it does work on older computers as you saw it gets recognized as a USB hard drive but that's nothing to worry about and so I'll be posting a review of this drive and the other board that I have coming in so thanks for watching so in the Box of the one lane adapter we have our screws with the same kind of SSD mounting nut a big bracket small bracket and of course the card now the card has an LED on it and that's pretty much it so this is the other card compared to it as you see it's a lot smaller and then within nvme m.2 SSD you can really see how just small this card is so it's a really good option for you know tiny form factors and then of course um for even cheaper prices they have the X4 adapter so I paid about I don't know seven and a half dollars for this but for six you can get a X4 adapter if you need it so let's install this SSD and see how it looks now when installing this this little nut adapter it's very small it goes on so much easier than the other one um you don't have to force it on and you don't have to struggle with it it's very small though but it is much appreciated so I'm just having to take the screws out of this cover this out and then somehow figure out how to snap this thing out it's very very difficult oh boy my GPU is really sagging but got it out hopefully I can get that card installed it's a very tight fit but let's see how it works I installed the bracket on the wrong side that's why I had to take it out I was wondering why I was warping but it's straight that is how your bracket is supposed to be and there's ever so slightest wiggle it doesn't matter it doesn't hurt anything and it's actually pretty fine and it might even be tight on your SSD but this is a wd sn530 so let's install it so I'm just going to stick this in here to make sure that is up and hopefully oh yeah oh the bracket is going on the wrong side you know it's very tedious thing trying to get an adapter as well but it just there we go slot it in pretty well and I don't see any visible bending it's straight and it fits very well on that bracket so it's a very good installation and it's you know accurate Dimensions you know that's a big thing buying these cheap cards so turning on the computer it does not recognize a drive as a drive unlike the other computer which recognized it as a USB hard drive I think that may be a bios thing so you can see this is actually pcie 2.0 1X Lane so it's pretty slow but it's still better than nothing it might be even better than a set of hard drive so you get a little red light it may blink or go green but we'll see once we get it benchmarked so I've gotten my computer to boot up the light is still red my hard drive is really slow now so I'm glad I got this um but now we have an allocated volume and it says this drive was new um only 113 gig read and 155 gig right um it turns out the transfer mode is actually PCI 1.0 by 1. um and the drive is 3.0 by 4. so if it is going to be I wonder how slow this is going to be that worries me so during usage that light does Flash may be annoying if you have a clear case so just so you know but here are the numbers compared um the hard drive gets 82 megabytes a second read while the SSD gets 207 megabytes a second read so you know that's an addition of 120 20 megabytes a second so that's pretty good but the SSD is running on pcie 1.0 by 1. that is pretty slow now obviously you can see that this SSD is being bottlenecked by the theoretical speed should be maybe 500 megabytes a second read or maybe it's even higher at a thousand or above that I don't remember but pcie 1.0 buy one lane that's the kind of performance you're going to get and I think that's okay for me and I think that'll work for me but it may not be good enough for you if you're wanting to upgrade so that is what one of these adapters looks like in the computer it's very interesting and I mean I can't complain I paid five seven bucks for that adapter and 20 bucks for that SSD so I think it's a pretty good value and it's going to get me through a lot of data and so that'll be very helpful to have so thanks for watching now the one problem with this method is that my old PC my motherboard doesn't support nvme ssds now that HP computer that I had used in the beginning of the video does support pcie based storage but this computer I have a motherboard a dh-67cl which supports second and third gen Intel chips that does not support pcie based storage so I could not use that SSD now an option is to if you have to on the screen you can see using a PC using Clover and all you do is you install this Clover software onto a USB stick boot to that USB stick and it runs a modified interface between the BIOS and the hardware and it just allows you to boot off of that nvme SSD but you know you always have to boot to that USB stick if you don't want to do that you can modify your bios but of course that's really risky and flashing your bios even normally is really risky so that's just a thing to keep in mind that you know if you're on a second or third gen computer you're probably going to have issues booting off of this now you can use it as a normal storage device but you can't boot off of it if you're using a fourth gen computer system still use caution because it may not work for me it did work but some computer systems may not work so search your motherboard search your chipset just and Google your computer if it's a pre-built or Google the components you have if you built it yourself but uh thanks for watching

Channel: Max Q

Views: 105,805

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Id: OlZJBIHe-2I

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023