Your motherboard's fastest storage slot might not be the one you should actually use first
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When building a PC, many people default to installing their SSD in the primary M.2 slot, assuming it's always the best choice. However, placing a PCIe 4.0 drive in a PCIe 5.0 slot provides no performance benefit since the slot negotiates down to the drive's native speed. Additionally, PCIe lane sharing on some motherboards means the primary slot may share bandwidth with the GPU, potentially causing trade-offs. The practical advice: check your drive's PCIe generation, read your motherboard manual for its recommended single-drive installation slot, and match the drive to an appropriate slot rather than blindly using the first one.
Table of contents
The fastest slot won't make a slow drive fasterBandwidth sharing only complicates things furtherMost people won't be populating that slot with anything else anywaySort: