Question What is best option for increasing storage for GAMES?

[grady115]

I have A LOT of games. I have four, 4gb M.2 ssd's and they are nealy full and I have many more games I want to add. My question is, What is the best route? I will be using an Asus ROG Strix B850-A Motherboard. It actually has a second X16 PCIe slot that I plan to use an (AIC) in with one of my drives. Then one drive will go in M_1 by the CPU and one in M_2, both are Gen 5 X16. Tahts 3 of my drives. I want to have 5 or 6, 4gb drives but do not want to use the other M.2 slots because I do not want to share lanes with my GPU. I looked into something like the Asus Hyper M.2 Card that hold 4 drives and goes in am X16 slot but my mobo will only allow for (1) ssd. So where or how should I add 2 or 3 other drives?

 

[grady115]

Since you don’t want to share lanes with your GPU, you could look into using a PCIe expansion card that supports multiple M.2 drives. There are cards like the ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 that could fit, but as you mentioned, your motherboard limits it to 1 SSD. Another option is to find a PCIe RAID card or an NVMe PCIe expansion card that can support more drives. You could also consider using a dedicated NVMe storage enclosure connected via Thunderbolt, if your system supports it, to avoid taking up additional PCIe lanes. Make sure to check the card’s lane requirements and compatibility with your motherboard

I checked my motherboard specs and it does have 1 x Thunderbolt™ (USB4®) header. So if I used that, would it be as fast as if I had the drive connected directctly to an M.2 slot?

 

[kschendel]

Unless you enjoy throwing money around, I'd take the easy way out and add some SATA SSD's. You can move some less active stuff to the SATA drive, if you like. Realistically, for most games that load once and run, you'll never notice the difference between a SATA drive and a fast NVMe.

(I run database server tests on my box, which has some SATA drives, a PCIe 3.0 NVMe, and a PCIe 4.0 NVMe, the latter being Samsung 970/980 Pro. Subjectively I can't tell which drive I'm using; over the space of a two+ hour test run, the SATA drive comes in maybe 7-10 minutes slower than the other two. It's just not as big a deal as it seems by looking at sequential paper numbers.)

 

[tcsenter]

Unless you enjoy throwing money around, I'd take the easy way out and add some SATA SSD's. You can move some less active stuff to the SATA drive, if you like. Realistically, for most games that load once and run, you'll never notice the difference between a SATA drive and a fast NVMe.

That model only offers TWO SATA ports. Four M.2 but one is shared with the PCIE-X16 # 2 slot. Shared is a bit misleading, only one or the other can be used.

OP I would find another board with either more PCI-E lanes to the secondary PCI-E x16 slot (e.g. 8x) that could support PCI-E bifurcation or two more SATA ports. This model appears to emphasize USB connectivity. The specs and user manual do not mention any sharing with any of the USB ports, all of them appear fully implemented and available. i.e. No disabling of one if something else is used, even the front panel.

So that would be your best option with this board, to harness some of that USB 10Gb or 20Gb connectivity for storage.