Aurora R6, Second Drive SSD M.2

Did your pc come with Optane?  If so, then you do not have a spare m2 slot on the mobo.  

It would make A LOT more sense to make the m2 drive a boot drive than a storage drive but yes, if you have an open slot you can make it a storage drive.

Thanks for the reply.

I don't know about Optane.  How can I check?

I hear what you're saying about the boot drive being the M.2 2TB SSD.  The task of moving the boot partition over there sounds a bit daunting.  I can check bios and see what the boot sequence is but I'm wondering if I plug in a 2TB M.2 If it will try to boot there first.

So you're saying keep the HDD for storage and add an M.2 2TB SSD and make it the C drive?  I'll have to research how to do that a bit more.

Given Windows integration with cpu and gpu would a game or program run any faster if it was loaded on an SSD and Windows was still on the HDD?

You can check, the Optane drive (if you have on) by looking at the motherboard behind the GPU, bottom right corner under the HyperX. 

BEFORE

If you do a clean install with the m2 drive it will boot there, boot manager will be set up that way. 

If you clone the drive, for example with Macrium reflect, it will not default to the m2 drive as the boot drive.  It will look for the 3.5" drive first. 

Also, if you do have optane, you need to unpair the 3.5" drive and the M2 drive in Intel RST before uninstalling/removing anything otherwise the PC won't boot. 

3.5" SATA drive speed, up to 150 mb/s. 

M2 NVME drive speed, up to 3,940 mb/s (expect actual to be around 3,500 mb/s read). 

In other words, the M2 NVME is up to 26 times faster than your spinning hard drive. 

Here's my benchmarks for example with a Samsung Evo 970: 

Samsung 970 Evo

Apologies.

I see from and early reply that this would work.

Hi,

Ok the M.2 slot is empty.  No Optane.

Can we add a 2TB M.2 there and see it as a separate drive without it trying to boot from there?

Thank you.

Hi,

Installed an EVO 970 but can't see it.  Again this is only a secondary drive.  I'm seeing a lot of discussion on two topics.

1. the 970 may not be compatible with the R6

2. need to go into bios and change from raid to ahci to recognize the drive.  However this appears to require a reinstall of windows.  Is this only if I'm trying to make the 970 the boot drive (which I am not).  Is it as simple as changing to ahci and rebooting then I'll see the drive?

Thanks for your help.

@Halobiont It is normal for a new disk to not be seen in windows when you first boot with it.  You need to initialize it before you can use it as a storage drive.  Type "disk management" in the search bar (bottom left of screen), right click initialize disk, and then initialize it using GPT.  Then create a new simple volume.  

Thank you for the replies!

The drive did not show up in disk management.

I'll try the drivers and read these links.  First I'll try to install the driver and install the drive.  Hopefully I don't need to convert from RAID to AHCI.  Seems simple but I can't brick or start over on this computer right now.