Upgraded (again!) my Octavius Maximus build

This time its an NVME SSD from Silicon Power.

I was browsing and doing some online shopping on Amazon when I stumbled upon the SSD. It was on sale, selling at less than $150 for an NVME PCIe Gen 3 X4 SSD with a 1TB capacity. SSD storage have gone really cheap recently, and I took this opportunity to upgrade my build again, this time increasing my storage capacity that my build has by an additional 1TB. Furthermore, its an NVME SSD which means it is super fast, with speeds of up to 3400mb/s. This is not the fastest SSD on the market but for the price, I think it is a good deal. Besides at that speed, you won’t notice it for my day to day use.

Installing the SSD on my current motherboard requires a few additional steps. This is because the SSD slot is hidden behind a metal shroud that showcased the Asus logo. Also the metal shroud serves as a heatsink for the SSD. And the shroud is behind the GPU. That means I first had to unplug the cables from the GPU, remove the GPU, unscrew the metal shroud before I can insert the SSD. After that, it was just a matter of screwing in the SSD and placing the metal shroud back and then the GPU.

Once that was done, I booted up the PC and viola! No fuss! Windows was able to recognise the new SSD and I simply had to do a simple format and drive assignment before I can use it.

One thing I am amazed by this SSD is that I forgot how small and compact NVME SSDs can be. And packing 1TB into such a small footprint is pretty impressive. Too bad my motherboard can only support one SSD at x4 speeds. I have another SSD slot further down, but it only supports x2 speeds. However, logically speaking with such great speeds, and for my type of usage, I won’t be able to tell the difference. And so, I could technically populate the slow x2 speed with a slower SSD. A slower SSD is a cheaper SSD. And so I can save money expanding my storage space and will never notice the difference in read/write speeds.

After installing the NVME SSD, I can finally appreciate the appeal of having such SSD in the system. It’s so small and compact. Now with all the latest X570 motherboards out there on the market, I am seeing 3 and even 4 M.2 slots on the motherboards. That is just insane.