PCI-E Sata expansion cards for additional SDD

[TheMastersSon]

That board appears to have the required slots for one of these or similar:

 

http://addonics.com/products/ad2m2s-px4.php

 

The cards run $15-$30 and once installed you should be good to go with any SSD drive, including M.2 NVMe or AHCI. You might want to ask in Dell's forums if any limitations exist with your system bios and these adapters, e.g. sometimes they're supported but not as bootable devices etc.

Edited April 14, 2017 by TheMastersSon

[FMod]

On replacing my drives, isn't having separate drives safer in case one fails? Not putting all of one's eggs in one basket? Currently I use a drive for music production, another for photography etc.

It does look like 3TB HDDs are cheap right now.

It's only safer if you use a redundant storage space, which is difficult to set up, so most people don't. Otherwise you're just spreading the risk, but it's the same in total - a higher chance of one of the old drives failing for a smaller loss if it does.

 

Reliability-wise it's easiest to live with 3 live drives: SSD where speed matters, one large HDD for data, one reasonably large HDD for backups. That makes it easy to back up the irreplaceable data. Using old small drives as cold storage (disconnected) also protects the data from failures other than HDD hardware, like power, malware, etc.

 

 

 

 

That board appears to have the required slots for one of these or similar:

http://addonics.com/products/ad2m2s-px4.php

Be careful with expansion boards. This one is a passive adapter, not an active controller.

The difference is that a passive board doesn't add any more slots, it just lets you connect M.2-SATA SSD to SATA slots you already have. If you're out of M.2 slots, it does nothing. The two SATA slots on it have to be connected to the motherboard's SATA for the M.2 slots to work.

 

The board I've linked and his original board are both controllers, i.e. they actually add slots (at the expense of PCI-E lanes).

[FMod]

 

My concern about SSDs are with rewrite degradation. Is this still a concern or have modern SSDs overcome this limitation? For example, could I run my entire Win7 install, modded gaming and apps off a single 250gb SDD?

Write wear is not a serious problem anymore. Hardly has ever been, really - most old SSD still have a lot more write cycles left than they'll ever see.

 

250 GB is very doable, but tight. You'll have to clean it up once in a while, manage your space usage, etc. All in all, if you can, get a 480 GB or larger model.

 

P.S. Lived with a 128 GB ultraportable a long while back, and managed to fit everything in... But, before every trip, I had to delete everything unnecessary for that specific trip. Easy to do when you're free to delete whatever, you'll just copy it from your real computer if needed. Not the case for your main PC. Given your needs (photos and music), 250 GB will require frequent data rearrangement.

[TheMastersSon]

To add to FMod's info, here's a chart for the company's SSD adapters. Some models include an onboard port and some don't:

 

http://www.addonics.com/faq/m2pcie.php

[Fatalmasterpiece]

sorry, meant to say early that my board doesn't appear to have an M2 PCIE slot. It does of course have traditional PCIE 3.0 slots.

 

I'm a bit confused. So If I install this controller and this EVO SSD do I still have to attach the SATA cable from the controller to a port or am I good with the PCIE connection?

Doesn't something like this not require a SATA attachement? https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104544

[FMod]

Do not do that, it won't work right. The 960 will only work as intended in a motherboard with a native PCI-E M.2 port. It will work to some extent with that card, but much slower than intended.

 

The Kingston is basically outdated.

In your situation, you should just lose one of the hard drives (or relegate it to cold storage) and buy a regular low-priced SATA SSD. If you had 6x4 TB drives, that would be a call for extra controllers.

[Erik005]

I use https://www.amazon.com/Asus-Accessory-32Gbit-flexibility-Retail/dp/B017YUCAXS/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1493227199&sr=1-1&keywords=asus+m.2+adapter with a 960 evo and it seems to work fine.

 

A m.2 drive requires 4 lanes of pci-e so you need an adapter that has a pci-e x4 connector to get full speed.

Edited April 26, 2017 by Erik005