Adding second M.2

[haed]

Good morning,

I have a HP ProDesk 400 G6 MT 7EL75EA, with Intel i5-9500 processor, HP 8599 motherboard, Intel B360 chipset.

My computer has a 256GB WD SN520 M.2 SSD but I would like to ADD another 1TB M.2.

Since my computer motherboard only has one M.2 disk slot I would have to install an M.2 disk adapter in a PCI slot. Quite right?

My computer has 1 (pci express 16x) slot and 2 (pci express 1x) slots.

The HWInfo32 utility (thanks Paul_Tikkanen) tells me that the 2 (1x slots) are empty and the 1 (16x slot) is in use (but I checked, it's empty).

Which M.2 PCI Adapter should I buy? And what would be the M.2 to buy for the maximum read / write speed?

Thanks for your help.

[BeemerBiker]

You can use either an x1 or an x4 PCIe adapter for your 256gb m.2

This assume you want to boot from the larger 1.0 tb drive.

Some system cannot boot from SSD that is on a PCIe card.

The x1 is 1/4 as fast the the x4

The x4 needs to go into the x16 slot which makes a Graphics Board upgrade distasteful as the x4 ends up in a parts box or dumped on eBay.

Consider getting a USB3 adapter for the smaller 256g stick. I will make the cloning easier and you can use the adapter as a fast flash drive.

[haed]

Thanks for your reply.
My wish would be to leave the original 256GB M.2 drive in the original slot on the motherboard with the operating system and software.
Install a PCI / M.2 slot to install a second M.2 disk (1TB) containing photos / videos for processing.
I noticed that M.2 drives would need at least one Pciex4x slot otherwise they wouldn't run at their full speed.
My doubt is: to do this, do I have to "waste" the Pciex16x slot for a Pciex4x / M.2 card?
Thanks again for your help.

[BeemerBiker · Accepted solution]

This is an old post and you may have already bought your PCIe board but what you want to do with the photos determines what your hardware requirements might be.

If you plan to manipulate the images, put together a video, ie: media creation and video editing /  manipulation you are better off with a graphics board that supports the software you plan to use.  Even the cheapest NVidia that has CUDA and OpenCL can vastly outperform the fastest CPU.

If you just want more storage than any  of the x4 PCIe adapters can easily add 1tb  of space.  The x4 is useful for video streaming but if just a library of images an x1 card is fine.