M.2 drive in pcie adapter help, please!

[Steve_Hawtin]

Hi you bunch of geniuses. I recently bought 2 pcie M.2 1tb drives thinking I was clever. Got them and realised my mobo (Aurus B450 M) only has 1 slot. Rather than send the other one back, I bought a pcie adapter. All went in fine, started installing games to both. Neither will run games, they all crash either on loading or seconds into gameplay. They crash with various ‘not enough memory’ errors. Videos, photos, movies etc work fine, I can also stream films etc down stairs to my tv from both.
I have: Ryzen 5 5500, RTX3060 12gb, 16gb corsair 3200 ram. 3060 is installed in nearest pcie16 to the cpu. Adapter is in the bottom pcie lane. I can’t see any bios settings that would help. Bios/chipset is up to date. Can anyone see any obvious errors I’ve made? Is it a lack of lanes? Thanks in advance.

[Bruce]

g’day Steve and welcome to the forum.

have you tried leaving the PCIe adapter out of the equation for now?
let’s see if one new NVMe drive works fine first?

let’s get your complete PC specs.
get Speccy; Speccy - Download Builds
in Speccy, click File > Publish Snapshot (hit Yes if prompted to proceed with publish) > Copy to Clipboard > Close.
now you can paste that link into your next post.

Speccy doesn’t show the Power Supply Unit, so list the make/model of the PSU.

Is Speccy safe?

[Steve_Hawtin]

Thanks for the reply.
Here’s the Speccy: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/3...zUP34xWOekXGbw
Power supply is Corsair VS650.
Speccy was done with pcie adapter in, but I will remove it for now and retest the mobo nvme for games.

[Steve_Hawtin]

I’ve removed the adapter with the other nvme, and so far the couple of games I’ve tried (albeit for only a few minutes at a time) have worked fine off the motherboard nvme. I’ll continue to move other games to this drive and test them and also test the existing games more thoroughly.
Is there an issue with having more than one nvme installed? Or perhaps having it through an adapter as well as a motherboard one installed? Can the controller be bugging out?
I did do a bit of rewiring yesterday as an ssd had suddenly stopped showing up. It ended up being a sata cable issue. At the same time I removed two 1tb HDD’s I still had in there which weren’t being used any more.
So I now also have less sata connections into the motherboard (I did have all 6 populated) - although one of those HDD’s is being being replaced with a 1tb ssd on Saturday when it arrives. So I will end up with 4 ssd’s, 1 nvme with a spare nvme and an adapter. I also have a nvme to ssd adapter on the way as a backup to see if the nvme will work through that.

I know this seems like a lot of trouble to get gen 4 nvme’s to work on a gen 3 motherboard, but I will be replacing the motherboard at xmas with a gen 4 one, and I got the nvme’s on offer and went with gen 4 so they’d upgrade along with the motherboard. I will also be upgrading the ram and cpu early next year.

[Bruce]

having more than one NVMe is fine.
already having one on the mobo is fine.
and it should also be fine having a Gen4 device on a Gen3 mobo, just means the device will run at Gen3 specs.

my theory is the adapter itself, may either be a bad unit, or it’s incompatible with your mobo or that NMVe connected to it.

[Bruce]

@Steve Hawtin - any news?