> one of them plug into the board SSD thingies?

An m.2?

I considered one of those but the connector being underneath the motherboard was too much faff so I got a regular 2.5" SATA. Just realised I'm not sure if there's anything in the case to mount it though, probably need a 3.5" bracket. Arse.

Yeah an m.2 thingie. No idea where the connector is but it's a prebuilt system so I don't care :D

Just use duct tape to put a 2.5inch drive in a 3.5inch slot. Works every time.

Why bother with that? Just leave it dangling on the bottom of the case like I did.

I checked online, it's a Jonsbo U2 Mini-ITX case, and the drive bays are literally just screw holes in the bottom (or side) of the chassis...

So, no brackets, tape, nor dangling necessary. :)

Screws? Why bother with that. Just plug it in and leave it hanging somewhere :)

Not seen drives held in directly to the case before.

Since mine has a rather large passive cooling coil in the middle, and the cables are long enough that it'd be on the floor anyway, screwing it in place means no need to worry about it getting knocked by clumsy oaf cleaners.

Apparently the dell XPS tower has that for expansion bays, too. Also a fancy hinged PSU tray. But also just read that the CPU is soldered, so no upgrading that later. Good job I went for the beefiest one I could :D

This is a tower? Fucking hell.

Underneath the motherboard? That's strange! I have an M2 SSD on mine and the connector is on top. Fitting the drive was no more difficult than installing a PCIe card. Probably easier than a SATA one actually as only one screw is required, and no cabling.

Yeah, and it wasn't obvious when I was first looking at the manual diagram - I was like "Huh? It can't be there, that's where the SATA cable connects, it wouldn't fit", before realising it was just not well labelled.

Guess it's because Mini-ITX has limited space, and putting it next to the SATA but on the reverse is probably the most efficient layout - a quick search shows other Mini-ITX boards also have it on the back.

Had the connector been more conveniently accessible I probably would have gone for m.2, but SSD will be good enough, and (once I've got it setup) I can remove the 3.5" HDD and will have absolutely no moving parts. Hooray! :D

Mine just sits under my desk upstairs so not usually worried too much about anyone banging it. That's why I have a spinny disk sitting in top on my DVD drive (which is screwed in) and the SSD dangling around the bottom of the case.

Yup. Fucking Dell T_T

I see your point. Under the board is a bit daft and a right sod to reach. Mine however is a normal ATX board, hence the nice, easy access.

Full ATX? Haven't had one in ~7-8 years.

I like a proper tower PC :)

Besides, small ones don't have room for my five hard drives (not counting the SSD)...

Proper full ATX? Or Mid ATX

Oh. I meant the MB.

Does the M.2 drive have any benefit over a normal SSD? Apart from less space as it's directly on the motherboard?

Supposedly faster on PCI-X lane than over SATA.

Standard ATX, same as the standard one in the picture in here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATX

Chrisss: Potentially, yes. Assuming it's a PCIe/NVMe capable slot, you can get much faster transfer rates, lower seek times etc. SATA is limited to 6Gb/s (600MB/s in other words).

Note that M2 is just a form factor and can run in legacy SATA mode, however it can also support PCIe/NVMe mode which allows for transfer rates of many GB/s. The Samsung 960 Evo drive in my machine for example is specced for up to 3.2GB/s read transfer rate and 1.9GB/s write.

I doubt I get that kind of performance out of it, but the point is that for modern SSDs, SATA is the bottleneck and NVMe/M.2 removes that bottleneck.

Edit: Just ran the Samsung Magician benchmark on my drive. Scores are 2,598 MB/s read and 1,758MB/s write. Certainly a lot more than SATA can deliver...