Which SSD to get?

You’re good to go as far as I can see. There are negligible power issues with a drive like that, and yes the M2 slot is where it goes. Be prepared for the world’s smallest screw…

Thanks for the responses.

One more thing: NVMe 1.3 vs 1.4 shouldn’t matter for compatibility reasons, correct?

Dunno tbh. Doubt it :) What are you actually doing? Replacing that other drive?

I’m adding a second drive to the free slot that I was asking about. For the new one I was looking at a Samsung 970 EVO Plus (NVMe1.3), or a 980 (1.4). I don’t know why those, other than they seem to be popular on New Egg. I’m debating whether to go with 1 TB or spend twice as much and get 2. The 980 tops out at 1 TB, but it’s newer. And 980 is a bigger number than 970, so…

You won’t notice any difference in performance outside of specialist use. If you need the extra space I’d get the big one. They’re both good drives :)

I think I’m using that 970 right now.

980 is really a bit more of an enterprise-level drive. Go for the larger capacity on the 970. You really won’t notice any difference.

I ended up deciding 1 TB was enough, and went with the 980 because it was $20 cheaper at that capacity. I mostly just want room to have my old reliable games ready to go whenever. GTAV & RDRII, AssCreed, the XCOMs, the Arkhams, Forza, etc. They take up some space.

PCIe gen 3 vs 4 doesn’t matter. What does matter is whether your drive has onboard cache and whether it’s TLC or QLC, but even then you probably won’t notice the difference between a cheap Intel 660 and a high-end samsung 980 Pro outside benchmarks.

I accidentally bought a Samsung QVO drive and it sucks. Don’t be like me and buy a QVO drive. It’s slower than a mechanical hard drive.

Touche, at this point in my head SSD is just “flash drive that otherwise works like spinning drive” rather than what it properly stands for, which NVME certainly is, just with a different bus technology.

Never heard of this type before.

Not sure why you would say this. The peak read bandwidth is double on 4 vs 3, and is substantial in real-world use even if not double. Some example data:

Samsung’s QLC offering apparently. “Quality Value Optimized” so the QVO is meaningless marketing goop. I’m sure it’s faster than a SATA drive but it does seem to be on par with a 10k in throughput, which surprised me.

It drops to mechanical HD speeds after something like 70GB.

Also, DirectStorage is coming and is reputedly going to be designed with PCI-E 4 primarily in mind. Assuming it lives up to the hype, which is an assumption for sure, that’s likely to matter significantly.

Are you talking about something like IOPs/Capacity? That’s always been a red herring in my book, you’re not going to try to access all 4TB at once.

That speed doesn’t matter for most uses, unless you’re dealing with extremely large files on a frequent basis, like editing raw 4k video.

The aspect of DirectStorage that relies on super fast PCIe gen4 SSDs is bullshit. The aspect that deals with hardware texture decompression may be real and impactful.

It is a slow piece of shit because only on slow external mechanical HDs and this QVO do I ever see Steam client stall “not responding” (white borders on program) constantly when installing Steam games to this drive.

That sounds basically broken. I didn’t have that happen on the intel 160GB SSD I paid $500 for back in like 2009.

Yeah I never had that with my 40GB, 120GB Intel SSDs and my budget Crucial SSDs.