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I currently have a Z270 Tomahawk Arctic motherboard. Initially I bought an SSD (125GB NVMe) that I assume is in my M.1 slot right now. I recently purchased a 2280 intel NVMe (1TB) which I figured out would indeed be compatible with either one of my M slots in my motherboard (M.1 & M.2 support 2280). I have downloaded the Z270 Tomahawk Arctic motherboard manual found here. I am a bit lost because I do not quite understand the verbiage in the manual and basically what I am trying to figure out is if my motherboard will split the speed between my 2 pcie lanes or if i will get the same speed on both that I currently do on the one I have. I may have missaid something here, this is just my current understanding as I am ignorant on this subject.

EDIT: I guess I am looking for "the answer" but I also want to know how I can tell myself in the future?

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  • What exactly is your question? Your question is confusing, M.1 isn’t a standard, and even if it was Z270 Tomahawk Arctic only has M.2 slots.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 4, 2019 at 20:34
  • If my mobo will split the speed between the 2 ssd's in which case I'd need to transfer the content of the smaller one to bigger one, or if it would be better to just keep both if theres no performance issues using both? and also how i can figure this out in the future from the manual, like the verbiage i am missing? sorry if this sounds ignorant, i just dont know what i dont know and trying to slowly understand.
    – jdmsyn
    Oct 4, 2019 at 20:38
  • like if i use 2, will i see any performance issues or will it be slower since there is 2 (I understand pcei lanes are shared)? or will it behave the same as it does with 1? Hopefully i cleared up any confusion.
    – jdmsyn
    Oct 4, 2019 at 20:40
  • Motherboards with NVMe support will document which PCIe slots are disabled when a device is detected shared M.2 slot. A single or even multiple SSDs will not saturated a motherboard’s PCIe lanes.
    – Ramhound
    Oct 4, 2019 at 20:48

1 Answer 1

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I am trying to figure out is if my motherboard will split the speed between my 2 pcie lanes or if i will get the same speed on both

You will get full support for 4x PCIe 3.0 on both M.2 slots at the same time. That is a total of 8x PCIe lanes dedicated to the M.2 slots.

This is stated in your motherboard manual:

Storage

  • 2x M.2 slots (Key M)
    • Support up to PCIe 3.0 x4 and SATA 6Gb/s
    • ...

There is nothing specifying that the M.2 ports do share bandwidth. If that was the case the manual would say something about it.


Your motherboard does share SATA connections with the M.2 slots though. Since you are using PCIe (NVMe) SSDs this is not an issue.

According to your motherboard manual:

The SATA1/ SATA5 port will be unavailable when an M.2 SATA SSD module has been installed in the M2_1/ M2_2 slot.

SATA1 and M2_1 share a SATA bus. SATA5 and M2_2 also share a SATA bus.

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    First off, thank you for this! Second, this is what i was looking for exactly when i said i didnt know what verbiage to look for, i didnt know if that meant on each or in total. Thank you again!
    – jdmsyn
    Oct 4, 2019 at 20:53

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