Z370 Aorus Gaming 7 - Which M.2 socket should I use

[MikhailCompo]

I have read the manual (not like me....) but I cannot establish which M.2 socket I should use.

I assume it is the one with the heatsink, but I have connected my Samsung 960 Evo to that socket, and my transfer rates are significantly lower than I would expect (>1000 MB/s).

I am using the Samsung v2.3 driver.

1) Is the 'drive' in the wrong socket?
2) Are there BIOS settings I need to change?
3) How can I confirm the socket is PCIe x4 speed?

Thanks in advance!

[absic]

Hi there,

I have had a look through the User Manual for this motherboard and I would place the Samsung drive into the middle slot on the motherboard, as this will allow all of the SATA ports to remain available. This doesn't mean that the drive will run any faster though.

Which Samsung drive are you using exactly?
What read/write speeds are you getting at the moment?
Have you tested without the Samsung driver?
What OS are you running?
What are you full system specs?

[MikhailCompo]

Hi there,

I have had a look through the User Manual for this motherboard and I would place the Samsung drive into the middle slot on the motherboard, as this will allow all of the SATA ports to remain available. This doesn't mean that the drive will run any faster though.

Which Samsung drive are you using exactly?
What read/write speeds are you getting at the moment?
Have you tested without the Samsung driver?
What OS are you running?
What are you full system specs?

Thanks for replying! Sorry for my lack of response....

In the end I put the 'drive' in the socket with the heatsink. I read that with this motherboard all the M.2 sockets run at 4x speed (I am only using one GPU).

This might not be the case if i connect a 10GBE NIC though, I am not sure, will check that when it comes to it.

Samsung 960 Evo
Windows 10 Pro 1709

Benchmark software is showing 3GB/s read speeds but before i was relying on Windows 10 Task Manager (performance tab) which was showing a lot lower when transferring a large file. The problem is though, nothing else in the machine can read faster enough to max out the 960 Evo, so I can only rely on synthetic tests/benchmark software.

I am happy now, so this can be marked as resolved.

Cheers