M.2 slot compatibility query

[SteelGalaxy6129]

I own a tg01-1042na and wish to add an nvme drive to the vacant m.2 slot. However I am not sure if it is compatible with nvme and if it is, will the probably limited bandwidth make it not worth just upgrading to a sata ssd instead. May be a stupid question, I am new to pc upgrading.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

Your PC comes with an HP 'Erica 3' motherboard.

Below is the link to the specs:

HP Desktop PCs - Motherboard Specifications, Erica3 | HP® Support

The product specs indicate that your PC came with a 1 TB mechanical hard drive.

I recommend that you install a NVMe SSD which would be around 4x - 5x faster than any SATA SSD is.

The PCIe generation of the M.2 SSD slot is PCIe Gen 3.0 so transfer speeds are limited to a maximum of 4000 MBPS.

The best SATA SSD on the market today has a maximum transfer speed of 560 MBPS.

You can install a PCIe Gen 4.0 SSD but it will not run at its maximum advertised read/write speeds from the Gen 3.0 slot, however you may find that a Gen 4.0 SSD costs less nowadays than a PCIe Gen 3.0.

A recommended Gen 3.0 SSD would be the Crucial P3 and a recommended Gen 4.0 SSD would be the Crucial P310.

In order for the PC to boot from the NVMe drive, you are going to have to move the SATA drive's data connector wire to SATA port 1 because port 0 is the SATA boot port and the PC will always want to boot from the SATA drive 1st and not the NVMe SSD.

I believe that if you plug the data connector in port 1, then the drive will only be used for storage and Windows won't try to boot from it.