These are some tips to make it work (temporarily), but I don’t recommend doing them if at all possible, and if you do, make sure that you don’t just leave it like that. It’ll hold your drive down just fine, to the point where you don’t even need to bother with the M.2 screws when you do find them. Though the drives might come loose If you move your PC around a lot. Skip the M.2 Screw entirely So give it a search and see if you can find something. You probably won’t find something perfect, but even a close enough fit is fine. M.2 Drives don’t really need to be screwed down flat onto the motherboard, they temporarily (!) work perfectly fine just hovering at an angle of 30°. Hopefully, that explained everything you wanted to know about what you can do if you lose an M.2 screw!

Some motherboards don’t have standoffs. Some do, and you need to install them. Some come with them pre-installed. And so on. So there’s a non-zero chance that there might be a screw that could fit an M.2 standoff in your collection. M3X3 screw(most computers include these. These secure the Y1WJX M.2 drive carrier, or a 2.5" drive into 745TM) So if you want to buy some screws for M.2 standoffs, what you need are M2 screws. Specifically, you want to get the following M.2 screw size: “ M2x3mm“. MacGyver it (Not Recommended)The original SATA protocol was designed to maximize the performance of platter (physical spinning) hard drives. With the proliferation of SSD drives, the SATA storage management protocol has become a limiting factor. The NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory) protocol has been designed for solid state drives and uses the PCIe bus for optimal performance. An M.2 drive may support SATA or PCIe/NVMe but not both. Depending on the drive, and what the computer can support, not all M.2 drives work in all computers.

So you don’t need to screw them in, but it’s such a simple and easy safety measure, there’s no point not doing it. If you’re handy at all in any way, you most likely have an assortment of screws you’ve collected over the years. Just make sure you don’t destroy anything by trying to jam in a screw that’s way too big. Tape the M.2 Drive Down Yes, this is a possibility, but one that should be done with utmost care, if you don’t want to loose your data or fry you parts mid-session. This is certainly not recommended for any serious or long-term use, but can be done for short sessions of data copying or if your screw is arriving the next day. FAQ Do You Need a Standoff for M.2 SSDs?If you just want to make sure the drive stays where you put it and want something that’s lowkey. This is an option. Each screw size is described using two numbers – the ‘M’ number and a number indicating the length of the shank, in mm, so M2 screw dimensions of M2 x8, are 8mm long, measured under the screw head. Get some actual M.2 screws and do it right. But in the meantime… Look for Old Small Screws in Your Home M.2 screws, a relatively new addition to the menagerie of things that you have to screw into your motherboard. M2 screws are typically used in the manufacture of small items of electrical equipment, laptops, cameras and mobile phones. The “M” designation for metric screws indicates the outer diameter of the screw in millimetres, so for an M2 screw, the outer diameter is 2mm. However, in practice the actual diameter might be between 1.9mm-2mm due to manufacturing tolerances.