Hard drive using SATA

[David (PassMark)]

If the motherboard doesn't support NVMe booting, get a small SATA SSD as a boot drive (e.g. 120GB), then a larger M2 drive as a data drive. And if you really need a lot of storage, get a traditional spinning HDD as a 3rd tier of storage.

Adaptor cards look like this
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0020-_-Product

[Shanok]

Roger that, will investigate thanks

[David (PassMark)]

PCIe with M2 adaptor is the same speed as a dedicated M2 slot.
Only thing to check is if your motherboard's BIOS can boot from a NVMe drive.

[Shanok]

Looking into those now, thank you kindly. I'm guessing not a significant amount of performance is lost using that setup to preclude using it in favor of the ol SATA?

[David (PassMark)]

You can get an cheap adaptor to use a M2 drive in a PCIe slot.

SATA drives are limited to about 500MB/sec by the interface speed. So they tend to bunch together in the HDD benchmark chart. If you look around 5000 mark level and below, most of them will be SSDs using SATA.

For example the Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB is one of the top SATA drives.

[Shanok]

Reviewing the benchmarks it appears most everything reviewed and posted are sticks, m.2 or nvme stuff. My mobo I just acquired doesn't support those and I am searching for the best SATA hard drives...is there a way to sort or filter for that?