Can't set M.2 speed on new mobo

Hi

Well, I've now built my husbands new PC but I do have a little problem. Part of the upgrade included an NVM-e SSD which I was led to believe had to be set up for the speed you wanted it to work at. This I got from a YouTube tutorial where the guy had to set his mobo firmware from x2 to x4 for the M.2 SSD. However, I have the problem that I seem to have no way of changing this setting. I can find very little reference to M.2 SSDs at all other than an option to enable M.2 Optane Genie and this seems to be for setting up a RAID system.

The mobo is an MSI MPG Z390 GAMING Pro CARBON AC and any help on this would be most appreciated. Many thanks.

Tracey

P.S. I should add that this is the first time I have installed an M.2 SSD.

I have two desktop systems with M.2 NVME boot drives.

As far as I know, neither system has a provision for setting the number of PCI-E lanes assigned to the M.2 slots. (That's the X2 or X4 thing.)

The MSI MPG Z390 GAMING Pro CARBON AC spec's the slots at PCI-E 3.0 X4. There are no settings that you need.

The Optane thing was setting up a small Intel Optane drive as an "accelerator" (read/write cache) for an HDD. That's a bit of a relic, done when SSDs were much more expensive than they are now. (The earliest SSDs I purchased were roughly $1 US per giagabyte. They're now more like $0.10.)

Hi bobkn

Thanks for that. I've been wondering if its something I've missed and it looks like I've been working on old info all along. I was looking at getting another M.2 for myself last night and realised the ssd itself is defined as a x4 ssd. I apologise for the unnecessary post but it is nice to have things confirmed. Thanks very much.

Tracey

I agree with bobkn. Should be plug and play.
You should read the MB manual as some SATA port may not be used when M.2 is used.
Can you give us the MVMe specs from the one you bought?

Use CrystalDiskMark to benchmark. It's a portable, doesn't need to be installed.