#M.2 Hot Potato

1 messages · Page 1 of 1 (latest)

coral moss
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Looking for some advice here; my windows installation recently got corrupted mid-update and started looping BSOD, so I bought a 990 Pro and finally moved off of the regular SATA SSD that I had been using as a boot drive.
I've been thinking on doing this for a while now as my boot times have been gradually getting worse and worse, and finally decided to bite the bullet. However, I have some "logistical" problems in the final stretch...

The first problem

The first problem I have is that I already have two M.2 drives, both are 1TB, and I've just bought a 4TB drive to replace them both.
I managed to take out one of the drives (an SN750 with a heatsink) and replace it with the new boot drive (the 990 Pro, which now has windows installed and everything is working) but the other one is stuck to the motherboard's heatsink with a thermal pad and I'm not sure how to take it out as I've never had to before. I'm also unsure on putting the new 4TB drive into that slot because if I do manage to get that drive out, the thermal pad would then be useless, right?

The second problem

The second problem I have is moving the data from the two 1TB drives (the SN750 and a 980 Pro) and onto the new 4TB drive.
My board only has two M.2 slots, one of them being already populated by the new boot drive, and the second will be populated by the new 4TB drive.

I bought a Sabrent M.2/USB-C enclosure that ended up being entirely useless because the drive I'm trying to transfer from has a heatsink and for some reason won't slot into the M.2 slot on the enclosure PCB.
It actually doesn't physically accommodate drives with heatsinks, so I took the PCB out of the enclosure and tried doing it that way, but it still didn't feel like it slotted-in and the drive still didn't show up (windows showed the drive, but it had no size - probably something to do with the slot issue?).

I'm now looking for something similar to the ASUS Hyper M.2 X16 expansion card, but there's probably an easier way to go about this.
Another potential solution that I thought of was to boot into a live OS (like Ubuntu) from USB and move files that way, but that feels like it has more risk and is slower as I'd be moving the files from the drives and onto a blank 1TB HDD.

Thanks 🙂

ancient sierra
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Well first problem you can use youtube. Or ask a local friend to assist.

coral moss
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Most of the results are either just installing an M.2 drive or something about removing the stickers

coral moss
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drive is in, also figured out the enclosure slot, so I'm barely managing to transfer stuff across using the enclosure - solved 🙂

fallen lava