Hey everyone! I recently ran out of storage and decided to upgrade by buying an M.2 SSD (Lexar NM790) for my MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX motherboard. However, my motherboard isn't recognizing the SSD at all. I've tried troubleshooting, but nothing has worked. Before I consider buying a new motherboard, I came across PCIe adapters, which seem much cheaper and easier. I understand I'll need an NVMe-compatible adapter rather than a SATA one, but I'm confused about whether my current setup can support it. My motherboard supports PCIe 2.0 x16, and I'm curious if that's enough for my SSD. What should I be looking for when purchasing a PCIe SSD adapter, and can my motherboard handle it? Thanks for your help!
1 Answer
It sounds like your M.2 slot might be the issue if the drive isn't even showing up in Disk Management. Typically, if it’s not detected in BIOS, using a PCIe adapter won't help because it indicates either a bad SSD or a motherboard compatibility issue. Note that even if your SSD is a gen4 drive, your M.2 slot only supports gen3, so if you did get an adapter and plugged it into a PCIe gen2 slot, you'd get significantly reduced speeds—possibly only 25% of the SSD's potential. Just keep that in mind!
I get that! I did check Disk Management too, but mine wasn't showing up in BIOS either, which made me think the same about the motherboard being a common issue. If your drive can still hit 1,800MB/s, that’s definitely better than your old SSD. Just make sure the adapter you choose is NVMe, not SATA!