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I have Asus PRIME H570-PLUS Motherboard which have two M.2 Slot.

  1. Gen 4.0
  2. Gen 3.0

Crucial P1 SSD is already installed on Gen 3.0 (Win 10 is installed) Gen 4.0 Slot is empty. (For some reason my Crucial P1 SSD did not work on Gen 4.0 and ignored it).

Later on after couple of years I planned to upgrade my SSD so I bought a XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE (2TB) without knowing it will work or not.

I plugged it in in Gen 4.0 and guess what? It didn't work. Tried to change all the settings in bios but no luck. Then after digging deep I got to know that Gen 4.0 will not work with Core i7 10700k processor only work with 11th Gen Processor.

Now I have 2 high speed M.2 SSD

XPG GAMMIX S70 BLADE (2TB)

WD Black SN850 (1TB)

and I want to completely remove the slow Crucial P1 SSD and use new M2 SSDs. One SSD as boot and other one as storage. I don't want dual boot.

How can I do that? Can I utilize PCIEX1_1, PCIEX1_2, PCIEX1_3, PCIEX16_2 empty slots? if yes then which PCIEx card I need to buy? or is there any way to use Gen 4.0 slot without Upgrading my 10th Gen Processor to 11th Gen?

Please help, Thanks in Advance.

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The PCIe 4 slot only working with an 11th generation processor probably means that the 10th generation only has 16 PCIe lanes and they all go to the x16 PCIe slot.

enter image description here

The 11th gen processors have 20 lanes and can have a one x16 slot and one x4 slot:

enter image description here

The reason for this is that on most motherboards the first x16 slot is served by the CPU and the remaining slots come off the Platform Controller Hub. On newer processors both the first x16 and first NVMe x4 slot both come off the processor.

The block diagram for your motherboard is going to be nearly identical to this B560 block diagram. Note the CPU serving the "1x16 + 1x4 lanes of PCI Express" in the top left corner.

enter image description here

There is no way for you to use that x4 PCIe 4 slot without getting a processor that has enough lanes for it. That means getting an 11th generation processor. The 10th generation simply does not have those extra 4 lanes of PCIe available.

What you can probably do is get a PCIe to NVMe adaptor like the one below. I have used one of these on a system with an i7-6700 in the past and it worked perfectly.

enter image description here

You may still be limited to PCIe 3.0 though.

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    those adaptors are passive and under a tenner at my favourite chinese crapgadget vendor, so its probably the cheapest option on the short term
    – Journeyman Geek ♦
    Commented May 14, 2023 at 13:50
  • Yeah, they're not particularly expensive and as long as you have a spare PCIe slot then they are almost guaranteed to work. Some motherboards might have some caveat that says "certain slots are shared between SATA controller and PCIe" and might disable certain SATA or PCIe ports as a result, but generally those systems have enough slots that at least one of them will work.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented May 14, 2023 at 13:57
  • @Mokubai So if i opt for 11th gen, Can I have one m2 ssd in gen4 and other on gen3 slot at a time ?
    – Jamshaid Alam
    Commented May 15, 2023 at 6:59
  • @JamshaidAlam yes. The gen 4 slot comes off your CPU while the gen 3 comes off your motherboard chipset. So if you get a cpu with 20 lanes then it should work. Alternatively get an adaptor as I mentioned at the bottom of my answer which will be the cheaper solution.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented May 15, 2023 at 7:45

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