My sister gave me her old work PC, and I opened the case because I want to replace or upgrade the storage. The Corsair Carbide 175R has empty drive bays for 3.5-inch hard drives and mounting points for standard 2.5-inch SSDs, so I initially thought the computer had no storage installed. However, Windows reports that the system has a 1TB drive and the PC works normally. Where could the storage drive be located?
3 Answers
That motherboard has multiple M.2 slots. The main storage drive is probably in the M.2 slot directly beneath the graphics card, often labeled something like “Hyper M.2.” You may need to remove the graphics card to see or access it, and there could be a small cover or heatsink over the drive.
It most likely uses an M.2 NVMe SSD, which is a small stick-shaped drive mounted directly to the motherboard rather than inside one of the case drive bays. Check the motherboard around and underneath the graphics card. The drive may also be covered by a heatsink.
You can confirm the drive type in Windows. Open Task Manager with Ctrl+Shift+Esc, select Performance, and choose Disk 0. It should identify whether the drive is an SSD or NVMe drive and show its manufacturer and capacity.
An M.2 2280 drive is about 22 mm wide and 80 mm long—roughly the size of a stick of gum—so it can be easy to miss compared with a normal hard drive.