I'm planning to expand my PC's storage and want to confirm my options before buying another drive. My system has a Gigabyte A520M DS3H motherboard, a Ryzen 5 3600XT, an RTX 3060, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, a Samsung 970 EVO 500GB NVMe SSD, and a 500GB Toshiba SATA hard drive.
The motherboard appears to have only one M.2 connector, but I'm not sure how to verify that or whether my current Samsung drive is using it. Can I add another M.2 NVMe SSD without removing the Samsung? If there isn't a second M.2 slot, could I use a PCIe adapter instead? Would the RTX 3060 block the available PCIe slots, and where are those slots located?
2 Answers
The A520M DS3H has only one onboard M.2 slot, so there isn’t a second M.2 connector available for another NVMe drive. You can still add storage through the motherboard’s SATA ports, although a SATA SSD will have lower bandwidth than your existing NVMe drive.
A PCIe-to-M.2 adapter is another option. The board has smaller PCIe x1 slots, but an NVMe drive installed in one of those would be limited to roughly x1 bandwidth, making it closer to SATA speeds rather than using the full performance of the SSD. It could still offer better access times than a mechanical hard drive.
The RTX 3060 may cover one of the lower slots depending on the card’s thickness, but many 3060 models leave enough room for an adapter in the upper PCIe x1 slot. Check the exact GPU model and the spacing inside your case before buying anything.