Is anyone using a Gigabyte Z97 motherboard and an NVME SSD with a PCIe adapter? How does it perform compared with the M.2 slot?
@kyriacos
The performance of an NVMe SSD depends not only on the quality of the SSD itself, but as well on the connection of their in-use data transfer lanes. A direct connection of the lanes to the CPU is much better than an indirect one via chipset.
So her is my answer: There is no general performance difference between a direct insertion of the NVMe SSD to an M.2 slot or a PCIe connection via adapter (provided, that the adapter has a good quality), the only thing which matters regarding the performance of an NVMe SSD is the mainboard-internal connection of the slot’s data transfer lanes.
I have layed down my test results some years ago within >this< thread.
@Fernando The M.2 slot has up to 10 Gb/s data transfer. Shouldn’t a PCIe adapter have better data transfer?