I'm planning to expand the storage in my PC and want to confirm my options before buying another drive. My system uses a Gigabyte A520M DS3H motherboard, an AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT, an RTX 3060, and 16 GB of DDR4 RAM. The current storage consists of a 500GB Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 SSD and a 500GB Toshiba DT01ACA050 SATA hard drive. Windows and PowerShell identify the Samsung drive as NVMe and the Toshiba drive as SATA. I thought this motherboard might have two M.2 sockets, but I'm not sure which socket the Samsung is installed in or whether a second one is available. Can I add another M.2 NVMe drive without removing the Samsung? If there isn't a second onboard M.2 socket, could I use a PCIe adapter, and might the graphics card block the appropriate slot?
2 Answers
The RTX 3060 models generally aren’t thicker than three slots, so an adapter may physically fit in an available PCIe x1 slot, depending on the exact card and how the other expansion slots are arranged. Before purchasing, check the motherboard manual and measure the clearance around the GPU. Also keep in mind that an NVMe drive in a PCIe x1 adapter may offer better latency than a SATA hard drive, but it won’t run at the same speed as the drive in the motherboard’s main M.2 socket.
A PCIe-to-M.2 adapter is another possibility. The board has additional PCIe slots, but the smaller x1 slots would limit the drive’s bandwidth to roughly PCIe x1 speeds—closer to SATA performance than to the full capability of an NVMe SSD. Check that the slot is free and that your GPU’s cooler doesn’t cover it.
So there isn’t another built-in M.2 socket, but a PCIe adapter could work if one of the smaller slots remains accessible beside the graphics card?