If you don’t have enough storage space in your PC but you want to rely on super fast NVMe storage (for gaming or content creation), what should you do? Surely if your motherboard has two NVMe slots (for example) and you have maxed both out, you are out of options – right?
Well thankfully not: there are actually seven different ways of getting more NVMe space available to your computer, as I discuss in this video. I also cover the pros and cons of each methods.
If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.
Video Transcript And Guide
Hey everyone, I recently bought Guardians of the Galaxy and yes, I know I’m a few years late to the party, but I’m really excited to play it. So let’s come and install it. Oh wait, my C drive only has 10 gig free? That’s a pity, but luckily I got two M.2 drives, so I’m going to put it on my other drive instead. 150 Meg free? Ah I forgot. Yeah, I installed ARK on it last night. Oh well, I can’t play computer games. I’m just going to read instead. Wait, what am I doing? Reading makes you violent. I must find a way of playing video games.
So here’s a bunch of tips for getting more M.2 space inside your computer. I’ve actually got two computers: my workstation computer and this comes with two M.2 slots in the motherboard, and my HomeLab NAS that comes with three M.2 slots in the motherboard.
Use All Motherboard M.2 Slots

And actually, that’s my first tip, which might seem kind of obvious, but if you’ve got a motherboard with more than one M.2 slot, just buy a second M.2 drive and make sure you actually use the other slot. That’s going to be the fastest and cheapest way of actually doing things.
Now you might be thinking, ‘Well, duh, I’ve already thought about that, but I’m not using that slot because it’s only Gen 3 and that’s too slow.’ But actually, Gen 3 is still fairly fast. It can read data up to 3.5 gigabytes per second, which is fairly fast. It’s certainly enough for gaming. And obviously, the other alternative is really to get like a SATA SSD, or try and download and stream data over the network, and they’re not great options either. So even if you have a Gen 3 M.2 slot, which both of my computers do, in the final slot, that’s still fairly fast for gaming.
Change Your Motherboard

But obviously, if your motherboard only has like one M.2 slot or maybe two, when you find you need more because you want to download more than like Call of Duty and ARK, then one option is to change your motherboard. And I know you’re thinking that’s a complete pain because you’ve got to take out the CPU heatsink and your graphics card and everything else, change everything, and you’re basically back to square one, you’re basically doing a fresh build. But it can only take a few hours if you know what you’re doing, and often changing your motherboard to get more M.2 space is actually one of the best options open to you.
Buy Higher Capacity Drives

The second tip though, if you need more M.2 space, is to consider going for a higher capacity M.2 drive. And this might seem like another ‘well, duh’ type tips, I appreciate that, but at some point you might have looked at the price of 4 terabyte drives, for example, and thought, ‘That’s way too expensive.’ But actually, often you can get 4 terabyte drives for as little as £200 or $200, especially if there’s a sale.
The reason I say the 4 terabyte drives might be worth considering is that often they have the best bang for your buck, in my opinion. For example, a Crucial P3 Plus drive, if you look at a 1 terabyte drive, they’re around £60. The 2 terabyte drives are then £105, and then the 4 terabyte drives at the moment are around £220, which I appreciate is slightly more than double the price of the 2 TB drive, but it’s not that much more, and often that 4 TB drive does go on sale for less than £200, and that offers you quite good bang for your buck.
If you load up your two or three M.2 slots with like 1 terabyte drives, you’re only going to be able to install like one or two games, kind of kidding on that point. But you’re not going to be installing that much, so if you want genuinely speaking, now if you want more than 500 games installed, you might want to look at above 1 terabyte drives. And as I said, 4 terabytes for me is the sweet spot. And yes, my workstation PC only has two slots, which gives me up to 8 terabytes if I go for 4 terabyte drives, but that is still quite a lot and it will store quite a few games, joking aside.
PCIe M.2 Expansion Cards

But if you’ve maxed things out or you just simply don’t want to change your motherboard, my third tip for you is to look at PCIe M.2 expansion cards. So as the name suggests, these are actual cards that plug into your free PCIe slots, if you’ve got any, and then you can put one to four M.2 drives in there. And they will cut down the bandwidth a little bit, because unless you use the top slot, which is the highest bandwidth one, you might only be limited to x4 or x1 speed in the other PCIe slots. But that’s often fast enough for gaming purposes.
But there’s something really important you need to check before you run out and you go and buy an M.2 PCIe card, and that is whether your motherboard supports BIOS bifurcation or not. What this is is actually, if your motherboard has, let’s say, two free PCIe slots, some motherboards give you the option of instead of having one of them running at x16 speeds and one of them running at x1 speeds, so in other words, the first one has 16 times the bandwidth of the second one, BIOS bifurcation is a benefit because it allows you to have your graphics card in your main slot running at x8 speeds instead of x16. But that won’t affect performance too much, and then you can have your PCIe M.2 expansion card in the other slot running at x8 speeds instead of x1 speeds. And that then gives you a lot more bandwidth for those drives.
The benefit of having that option enabled is that the PCIe M.2 cards that require BIOS bifurcation are often a lot cheaper, because they need to do less work under the hood. So on Amazon, I could go and get a good expansion card for around £22 right now from some random company, or if I wanted to get the Asus one, the Hyper M.2 Gen 4 card, that would be around £40 or £50, which again is pretty good.
Non-Bifurcation PCIe Cards
If your motherboard doesn’t have BIOS bifurcation, [it’s okay] but it will cost you more money. For example, Sabrent has a pretty well-known PCIe full M.2 slot card, but that costs around $179 or around £140 in the UK, which is quite a lot of money. Now, there is a really useful thread on the SFF forums which I’ll link to in the description, which does show a few other options which might only cost around £100 to £150 instead of the Sabrent card, but that is still ultimately a bit more money than if your motherboard does support BIOS bifurcation, you can just go out and buy a random £22 card and not worry about the actual splitting up of the bandwidth.
USB 3.2 M.2 Drive

The next option, though, is to actually rely on the fact that your computer will probably have USB 3 slots. You could go out and you could get a USB 3 based enclosure for M.2 drives, and this is actually for SSD cards, but the point still remains. You can basically buy an external adapter which plugs into your USB 3 slot, and then you literally put an M.2 card into the enclosure, and that’s a good way of actually getting more space.
But there’s a few things you should know, in fact, there’s two main downsides to be honest. Firstly, if your case only has USB 3.0 slots, then this option probably won’t work too well for you. You’d probably be better off with just sticking a SATA SSD inside your computer, because speed will be a bit too slow if you’re relying on USB 3.0. Here’s the other downside of these enclosures: many of the reviews say that they don’t actually get the speeds that they advertised, and that’s partly a problem with cheap, budget M.2 USB enclosures, and it’s also a problem with heat, because these enclosures, even if they got little fans and heatsinks or anything like that, heat is still going to be a really big issue for these USB drives, especially compared to an actual computer, which will be bringing in loads of cool air via the intake fans, and that’s going to help cool the M.2 slots, and there’s also a lot more spaces in computer systems to actually help cool the M.2 drives, unlike these USB 3 enclosures where things are just a lot more limited and heat is an issue.
But if you have to go down this route, it could work, but I’d just say read the reviews carefully and probably pay a little bit more. I wouldn’t just go out and spend, you know, £15 or $15 on some random no-name one with mixed reviews. I’d prefer to spend a bit more money, maybe for a 2-bay one from a more reputable company, because I think that’s going to be better in the long run.
Build (Or Buy) An NVMe NAS

The other option is to go out and actually build or buy an M.2 NAS, and then you’ve got storage accessible throughout your entire house. And obviously, there’s loads of different ways of achieving this. There are some ready-built M.2 boxes you can buy, although they usually are quite expensive. But the route I actually went for was I built my own, so this is my home lab NAS. I’ll just chair right the way, but I actually built my own. And basically, this was a fairly budget build. The motherboard is an ASRock, it’s not particularly expensive. I went for a refurbished PSU, which I talk about in another video, because I’m still a bit on the fence about it. I should have done that, but I specifically bought this motherboard because it has three M.2 slots on there, and then it’s got a free expansion card slot for PCIe as well, so potentially I could have seven free slots for my M.2 drives, which could give me up to 28 terabytes of usable space if I went for 4 terabyte drives. And yes, the actual formatted space in reality is going to be slightly less than that, but actually building your own can be quite a good option, because obviously you can customize things as you would like as well.
So that’s what I’ve done here with my HomeLab NAS, and I showed that off in another video. But that’s actually a really good way of getting more space in your system. But of course, there’s downsides to that too. One of the big downsides is it costs a lot more money than simply going out and buying a 4 terabyte drive and sticking it in your computer. You know, you’ve got to buy a new case, you’ve got to buy a new power supply unit, more RAM, more motherboard, more case fans, all of that stuff you’ve got to buy. All of that, so that clearly is a bit of a flaw with going out and building your own.

And for a NAS, yes, it brings loads of benefits, and if you’re into home lab stuff and building computers and tinkering, then it’s a really fun option, and that’s why I did it personally. But obviously, if you just want one computer and maximize the storage on just one computer, which I totally get, then building your own home lab NAS for M.2 space isn’t going to work very well. But that’s why I covered those other methods.
I think personally, changing your motherboard to have three to five M.2 slots, ’cause some motherboards do have those five slots, that can be a really good option. And then if you need more space, you should then get the PCIe expansion card, which can give you up to four more M.2 drives.
What I would caution though, is if you go with a Micro ATX build, you might only be able to access one of the PCIe slots, even if the motherboard says it has two PCIe slots. And that’s because Micro ATX builds are smaller, and the motherboards are smaller, and often the graphics cards, if you’ve got a high-end graphics card, that’s going to potentially cover the other PCIe slot. And I found that out with my old computer case and my old motherboard, which is why I actually upgraded it to this particular case. But I discussed some of the flaws with Micro ATX builds in another video if you wanted to check that out. And I also, if you wanted to stay with your build, I discussed some ways that you can access that other PCIe slot even if your graphics card is covering it in another video if you wanted to check that out.
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