Looking through the official ASUS Z97I-PLUS manual doesn’t help much either. The only thing I can glean from all of this is your motherboard can handle 2242, 2260 and 2280 sized SSDs; 22mm is the width and 42mm, 60mm and 80mm are lengths.

Female-Male - Unlike its female-female counterpart, the female-male threaded standoff has external threads. Most are hex-shaped so that they can be easily tightened with a wrench. 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. Some motherboards don’t have standoffs. Some do, and you need to install them. Some come with them pre-installed. And so on.

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Get some actual M.2 screws and do it right. But in the meantime… Look for Old Small Screws in Your Home

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. Hopefully, that explained everything you wanted to know about what you can do if you lose an M.2 screw!So there’s a non-zero chance that there might be a screw that could fit an M.2 standoff in your collection. 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? 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

Your point-of-view on the cost of these screws is understandable in broad terms. But I am pretty sure that kind of “89 cent per-bag” pricing is for very commonly available screws; not for odd-ball parts like this. 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. 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) 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 DownM.2 screws, a relatively new addition to the menagerie of things that you have to screw into your motherboard.