Is my M.2 NVMe Drive Positions Correct on my AMD Ryzen 7 7700X Build?

Hello All

just wanted make sure my NVMe drive positions are correct, i believe so, but not 100 percent sure

Slot #1 Samsung 990 Evo Plus 1TB Boot NVMe

Slot #2--Samsung 990 Pro 1TB Game NVMe

Sata drive plugged into Sata #1 Port
Samsung 860 Evo 1TB

If something not right i can fix it at the upcoming dust clean out sometime in the next week here, and clean system all up. did use Revo uninstaller to Remove Acronis True image in the past when i paniced worried on how i'd afford renewal and grabbed Macrium Reflect X deal for 4 PC"s for $49.99 for Life i think it was.

on the slot one drive i would partition 25% for C:\ drive and the rest of the drive as D:\ for data.
something like 250GB C: drive and then the rest of the drive for D:drive.

slot two as it is for your games.

that's how I would set it up. that way anything that goes wrong with C: drive doesn't effect your data on D: drive.
best of luck, Steve ..

Both of the M.2 slots are PCI-E 4.0, so it's not obvious why it would matter which drive is in which slot. I'd probably put the OS drive in Slot 1, as that's the one off the CPU.

The 990 Evo Plus, I don't understand. It's listed as PCI-E 4.0X4/PCI-E 5.0 X2. If that means it operates with 4 lanes in a PCI-E 4.0 slot, and 2 lanes in a PCI-E 5.0 slot, you'd get the same bandwidth either way.

I'm not sure what sort of deal you got from Macrium for Reflect X. I have a 1 year subscription, 4 licenses for $50.49. That was an upgrade price from Reflect 8.

If you choose 50% off annual plans for life, you will have to trade in your current Reflect Home V8 license.

Thats deal i took for Macrium before March 31st 2025

And yes 990 Evo Plus is listed as PCie 4.0 and 2 lanes for PCIe 5.0, but board doesn't even support 5.0 lol

Ohh good to know that doesn't really matter, sure wouldn't be too big a hassle to switch things around, but is sorta a hassle lol--I was just considering Swapping them around as the 990 Evo Plus Benchmarked Slower than the 2nd M.2 990 Pro

bikemanI7 said:

Hello All

just wanted make sure my NVMe drive positions are correct, i believe so, but not 100 percent sure

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The only position matters is the OS drive, and that would depend on which NVMe slot is the fastest. Other than that no.... position doesn't matter. This is just something people tell you to worry about when there's zero benefit to worrying about something that's not going to make a difference other than what I said of the OS drive.

Good luck.

Ohh ok then, Well the Boot M.2 Samsung 990 Evo plus I know for sure is in M.2 Slot 1 as I installed it on Christmas.

And bottom slot is 990 Pro 1TB

So think I really have nothing to worry on after all

bikemanI7 said:

Ohh ok then, Well the Boot M.2 Samsung 990 Evo plus I know for sure is in M.2 Slot 1 as I installed it on Christmas.

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Please re-read what I said....

Dru2 said:

The only position matters is the OS drive, and that would depend on which NVMe slot is the fastest.

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Meaning if slot 1 is faster than slot 2, then the OS drive should be on slot 1. That's the only thing that matter where slot positioning is concerned.

So yeah, outside of that no need to worry

bikemanI7 said:

If you choose 50% off annual plans for life, you will have to trade in your current Reflect Home V8 license.

(snip)

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You went with a subscription, then. Sound like what I did.

I wonder if I'm getting the perpetual discount? I didn't "upgrade" from 8 to X until 3 April.

(It's not much of an upgrade for me. I usually do full images. No faster than with 8.)

bikemanI7 said:

and grabbed Macrium Reflect X deal for 4 PC"s for $49.99 for Life i think it was.

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bikemanI7 said:

for Macrium before March 31st 2025

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"for" Macrium, or actually from Macrium? Source of purchase?

bobkn said:

Both of the M.2 slots are PCI-E 4.0, so it's not obvious why it would matter which drive is in which slot. I'd probably put the OS drive in Slot 1, as that's the one off the CPU.

(snip)

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Correction: both M.2_1 and m.2_2 are from the CPU. The manual states that M.2_2 isn't available with an 8000 series CPU. (Which is not what you have.)

Ok so I should be all set in think then

I tend to worry over nothing at times. Guess just how I am

bikemanI7 said:

, but board doesn't even support 5.0 lol

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AFAIK no consumer-grade motherboard currently has a PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 slot. The "x2" here refers to the slot having only 2 lanes instead of 4. So, in a consumer system, the 990 Evo Plus' ability to switch to PCIe 5.0 x2 mode has zero benefit. For that, you need to build a FrankenPC. Samsung's 990 Evo is the world's first hybrid PCIe 4.0 x4 and 5.0 x2 SSD — FrankenSSD has two different interfaces with two different lane widths

hdmi said:

AFAIK no consumer-grade motherboard currently has a PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 slot. The "x2" here refers to the slot having only 2 lanes instead of 4. So, in a consumer system, the 990 Evo Plus' ability to switch to PCIe 5.0 x2 mode has zero benefit. For that, you need to build a FrankenPC. Samsung's 990 Evo is the world's first hybrid PCIe 4.0 x4 and 5.0 x2 SSD — FrankenSSD has two different interfaces with two different lane widths

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I'm sure I'm misunderstanding what you mean when you say PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 slot, but my Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Xtreme motherboard has a PCI 5.0 M.2 slot....





That said, I'm currently running the PCI 4.0 Samsung 990 Pro in that slot, but plan on getting a Samsung 9100 Pro; just need to do some research on it.

Dru2 said:

I'm sure I'm misunderstanding what you mean when you say PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 slot, but my Gigabyte Z890 Aorus Xtreme motherboard has a PCI 5.0 M.2 slot....


snip

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I presume that it means that motherboards have PCI-E 5.0 X4 slots. Not X2 (only.)

It's not obvious to me what the point of a hybrid PCI-E 4.0 X4/PCI-E 5.0 X2 drive might be. The data rates from either interface should be the same. May as well stick with a plain PCI-E 4.0 X4.

bobkn said:

I presume that it means that motherboards have PCI-E 5.0 X4 slots. Not X2 (only.)

It's not obvious to me what the point of a hybrid PCI-E 4.0 X4/PCI-E 5.0 X2 drive might be. The data rates from either interface should be the same. May as well stick with a plain PCI-E 4.0 X4.

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Yes, PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 slots are M.2 slots electrically wired for only two PCIe 5.0 lanes instead of four.

When ServeTheHome did a review of the 2TB 990 EVO (not to be confused with the 2TB 990 EVO Plus) it turned out that there can be some extra benefit to running it in PCIe 5.0 x2 mode, or Gen 5x2 mode when compared to running it in PCIe 4.0 x4 mode, or Gen 4x4 mode. Scroll down to "Gen 5 vs Gen 4" on page 3, here: Samsung 990 EVO 2TB Review Hybrid PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 NVMe SSD

hdmi said:

Yes, PCIe 5.0 x2 M.2 slots are M.2 slots electrically wired for only two PCIe 5.0 lanes instead of four.

When ServeTheHome did a review of the 2TB 990 EVO (not to be confused with the 2TB 990 EVO Plus) it turned out that there can be some extra benefit to running it in PCIe 5.0 x2 mode, or Gen 5x2 mode when compared to running it in PCIe 4.0 x4 mode, or Gen 4x4 mode. Scroll down to "Gen 5 vs Gen 4" on page 3, here: Samsung 990 EVO 2TB Review Hybrid PCIe Gen4 and Gen5 NVMe SSD

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Surprisingly large differences.

But still mostly small.

I have a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 drive, but it's X4. Probably a pointless expense, outside of benchmarking.

bobkn said:

I have a PCI-E 5.0 M.2 drive, but it's X4. Probably a pointless expense, outside of benchmarking.

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I wouldn't call it pointless. When the 2TB Crucial T700 is empty, it has a little over 220 GB of dynamic cache allowing it to write at up to 12 GBps for over 20 seconds, and then this sustained write speed drops to around 3.6 GBps for the next 7 minutes or so before it drops even further as it enters the recovery stage. However, as the drive fills up with data, the aforementioned 220 GB dynamic cache will be reduced. So then the 12 GBps write you get when the cache has recovered won't last 20 seconds due to the drive no longer being close to empty. The more data you put on the drive, the worse this gets until finally it might become a bottleneck if, for example, the drive is maybe more than half full and your goal is to make it write an image of a ramdisk that contains maybe more than 110 GB of data to make it persistent.

That said, with Romex Primo Ramdisk with DMM, unused space on a ramdisk doesn't use up any RAM. As a result, freeing up space on the ramdisk frees up RAM. But then, for reasons that should be completely obvious, cleaning some files off of the ramdisk to free up some RAM also causes those files to be lost if they haven't been copied to the SSD first. A great example IMO of why using a ramdisk in conjunction with a fast SSD can be worth is Sandboxie-Plus. I know that I have already talked about this in several older threads on here, but I would still like to bring it up again anyway so here comes..

Whenever a sandbox is used to run a given selection of applications and/or processes in a sandbox, normally Sandboxie-Plus will make, in the sandbox, a copy of every file that is about to be modified by any process that is running in the sandbox, and will make that process modify the copied file so the original file remains untouched. This redirection of files is transparent to all processes running in the same sandbox, and, the "normally" here translates to "if no copy [nor previously modified copy] of the file exists in the sandbox and no exception rule [in the sandbox settings] was applied on the file". Registry changes also receive a similar treatment, and, the file redirection mechanism doesn't just take care of file modification alone, as it also handles file creation/deletion when it occurs.

However, for reasons that should be completely obvious also, each time when Sandboxie-Plus copies a file so as to to redirect a modification thereof, it causess a delay before the sandboxed process in question is able to proceed with modification. So you might notice it if the sandbox location is on a slow drive or if the file is big or there's a large number of files needing to be copied, or some combination of factors causing a spike in the sandbox write transfer. Especially when multitasking heavy I/O type stuff and whatnot.

An interesting point to note IMO is that processes running outside the sandbox can still have unrestricted access to the sandbox content. It means that if the sandbox location is on a ramdisk, it opens the road to get creative with things like letting various manipulations of various parts of content be controlled programmatically or via scripting to improve performance. That is, during those specific tasks that, under one or multiple dynamic sets of circumstances, are holding you back. So, working with a ramdisk can leverage real-world performance gains in a lot of situations like this. Your SSD has 1200 TBW (same as my 2TB 980 Pro) so, if you don't use it to swap lots of data between your RAM and it frequently repetitively with things like automation scripts or etc., then yeah.. I can guess that it will still be worth less than ten bucks by the time it finally wears out.

This kind of approach or strategy reminds me of the Windows 7 era when Marvell HyperDuo was still a thing. Unlike Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT or, to be more accurate, Stupid Response Technology) it let you choose what files you wanted to put on it. So does a ramdisk.

You have 128 GB of DDR5-6400. So use it.

An essay. Just what "bikeman17" was looking for, no doubt.

Well learning from the essays, and more experienced users is always welcome to me

bikemanI7 said:

Well learning from the essays, and more experienced users is always welcome to me

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You must be a great deal more sophisticated than I am if you found it useful.