Say goodbye to losing those ridiculously tiny M.2 screws

Asus TUF Gaming B560-Plus WiFi Q-Latch
(Image credit: Asus)

Asus is doing away with the fiddly M.2 screws in some of its latest motherboards by introducing a clip system instead. The Q-Latch is a small plastic erm… latch that flicks around to hold your M.2 drive in place. Asus showed off the M.2 Q-Latch in a Twitter video that sees it being used in a one-handed drive installation. I have already watched this video too many times, and I'm far too excited about getting my hands (that should be hand) on one.

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The Q-Latch will be appearing on 14 of Asus' upcoming X590 motherboards across various ranges, including the TUF Gaming B560-Plus Wifi pictured above, some of which are being released to coincide with the launch of Intel's Rocket Lake CPUs

Rocket Lake just happens to support PCIe 4.0, which makes improvements on this front even more welcome, especially as the second-wave of PCIe 4.0 is landing and tearing up the benchmarks. Check out our guide to the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs for more info.

Board walk

(Image credit: MSI)

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M.2 NVMe SSDs are awesome. They're much faster and much smaller than their SATA 3.5-inch siblings. You don't have to mess around hunting through your case for power cables and SATA connectors either—fewer cables is a win on its own in my book, but that's just because cable management is up there with root canal work in terms of fun.

The only real problem with M.2 drives is that tiny, tiny screw used to hold your drive in place. These little buggers do a great job of falling into the void never to be seen again. As the resident storage tester, I've dropped so many of these things, that watching this tiny video elicited a genuine smile. I need this little latch in my life.

Alan Dexter

Alan has been writing about PC tech since before 3D graphics cards existed, and still vividly recalls having to fight with MS-DOS just to get games to load. He fondly remembers the killer combo of a Matrox Millenium and 3dfx Voodoo, and seeing Lara Croft in 3D for the first time. He's very glad hardware has advanced as much as it has though, and is particularly happy when putting the latest M.2 NVMe SSDs, AMD processors, and laptops through their paces. He has a long-lasting Magic: The Gathering obsession but limits this to MTG Arena these days.