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NVME / SSD compatability or suggestion question
I have a Gaming/VR PC that I put together a couple of years ago which consists of Intel i7 4790k CPU, GTX 1070, 16GB of RAM, a 3 SATA 3 SSD drives and a couple of SATA 3 HDs on an ASRock Z97 Extreme6 mobo.
I've run out of space on the SSDs and I need to purchase another 0.5-1TB SSD but I'm not sure what makes the most sense due to the limited bus lanes available in that architecture. The board has one "Ultra M.2" socket which supports M.2 PCI Express module up to Gen3 x4 (32Gb/s) and another M.2 socket that supports SATA3 or PCI Express module up to Gen2 x2 (10Gb/s).
Mobo manual says that if I use the Ultra M.2 port than the PCI port which the GTX1070 is plugged into will drop down from 16x to 8x. I tried to research to see if this has any real-world impact and read conflicting results so I'm a little concerned as I may want to upgrade the graphics card at some point for improved VR and potential 4k gaming. Also, I'm not sure if this architecture can fully utilize the speed of something like a Samsung 960 EVO NVMe or if I'm better with sticking to regular M.2 or SATA3 solution.
Any thoughts or recommendations? Much thanks.