Which m.2 port is the NVME port for the Predator 17x - GX-792-77BL

birdjunk

is the third m.2 port (pictured below) the one that supports NVME?

mine shipped with the first two m.2 ports with regular ssd drives in a raid 0 configuration.  ideally, i would just put in a new 1TB nvme drive in the third port and copy my OS over to it and have the raid 0 drives as a secondary.

follow up question would be:
if this is not the case and, say, port 1 is the NVME port, could i put the new NVME drive in port 1, and then just swap the raid 0 drives to port 2 and port 3 without having to reconfigure anything software-wise?  as in, if i did the physical swap and booted up, would it still see the raid 0 drives that were now in port 2 and 3 and function properly?

thanks!

ven98

Where 1 and 2 ports are, the NVMe port is the one on which the SSD is from the picture.

ven98

The first port on which the ssd is installed(on the picture) is the one that supports NVMe. The other 2 are sata 3. Theoretically swapping the places of the SSDs should keep the raid 0 array, but I don't know how that would turn out in practice. Creating a raid 0 array is easy(many users even accidentaly created raid 0) using intel rapid storage technology.

NOTE: Make sure that you create a recovery driver before swapping the drives, because if the raid 0 is broken the data of both drives will be inaccessible.

birdjunk

just to be clear, when you say "first port" you mean the port on the bottom of the two that are in raid 0?
so, pictured below:
yellow 1 - is the lower, bottom port
yellow 2 - is the top port (that you can see the LITE-ON drive fully in the picture)
yellow 1+2 are the drives currently in raid 0
red 3 - is the third port

the NVMe-able port is the first, bottom "yellow 1" port?

will definitely make a recovery before trying any of this (thanks for the reminder!), and thank you for your reply!

ven98

Where 1 and 2 ports are, the NVMe port is the one on which the SSD is from the picture.

birdjunk

Just to follow up...
Prior to any of this, I made a recovery drive (as ven98 suggested) -this requires some kind of external hard drive, thumb drive with at least 16gb of space that can be wiped entirely- and did a File History back up (it seems there are several layers of backing up needed in Windows in order to restore your machine entirely).

I removed the Lite On m2 drives (configured in RAID 0) and installed a WD Black 1TB NVME drive in the lower Port 1 (Yellow 1 in the picture I posted).
I moved the Lite On m2 drives to slots 2 and 3 (yellow 2 and red 3 in the picture I posted).

Crossed my fingers and booted up... success!  RAID 0 did not die by being moved to ports 2 and 3, which would have resulted in losing the OS.

Next was creating a Rescue Media Builder (which requires 500 mb of space) on an external thumb drive (again, entirely wiped) for the Acronis software that came packaged with the WD Black drive.  

Then booting into BIOS with the newly built Rescue Media drive plugged in, moving it to the top spot under Boot, then rebooting to start from the Acronis drive.  From there, simply cloning the OS to the new NVME drive.

After cloning was complete, I removed the Lite On m2 RAID 0 drives (heeding the warning from Acronis that booting with two OS's installed was a no-no).

Then, I booted up the computer back into bios, restored the boot order, and rebooted again.

The computer successfully booted up from the new WD Black NVME drive.  The only funkiness was that the recovery drive was taking up nearly 500gb.  After a little research, I just deleted the recovery drive and Extended the main partition to fill the rest of the drive with Windows Disk Management.

So far, everything seems to be ok (knock on wood) and the drive is performing well (stats posted at the bottom).

Hopefully, this will help someone along in this process and if anyone has comments on a better way to do it, I am, of course, all ears.

In this process I discovered the glory that is M Key vs B Key vs M+B Key, summarized thusly for other novices such as myself:
A 'B' keying (pins 12-19) gives PCI Express SSDs up to 2x lanes of bandwidth, while a 'M' keying (pins 59-66) provides PCI Express SSDs with up to 4x lanes of bandwidth. Even with 2x lanes of bandwidth a 'B' keyed M.2 SSD still gives 10Gbit/s performance, whereas the 4x lanes on 'M' gives up to 20Gbit/s. M.2 SSDs with B+M keying maximize compatibility in both slots, and will operate with 2x lanes of bandwidth.

From this, I would gather that ALL NVME m2 drives are M Key, and regular speed m2 SSDs would generally be B Key or M+B key simply for compatibility.

For the Predator 17x I have, again from the picture:
Yellow Port 1 is Mkey (NVME)
Yellow Port 2 is B Key (regular m2 ssd speed)
Red Port 3 is B key (regular m2 ssd speed)

NVME Test Stats:

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.0 x64 (UWP) (C) 2007-2017 hiyohiyo

                          Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/

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* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

   Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) :  3353.344 MB/s

  Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) :  2742.697 MB/s

  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8) :  1611.539 MB/s [ 393442.1 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  8,T= 8) :   960.020 MB/s [ 234379.9 IOPS]

  Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   391.377 MB/s [  95551.0 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   219.965 MB/s [  53702.4 IOPS]

  Random Read 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :    45.486 MB/s [  11105.0 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KiB (Q=  1,T= 1) :   125.410 MB/s [  30617.7 IOPS]