M.2 Adapter card

[Redmud]

Hello,

I have a fairly old motherboard, MSI Z97 Gaming 5 and would like to put in an M.2 drive while the board does have an M.2 slot it is an older interface. I was thinking of possibly getting a PCIe adapter card and stick that in.

Currently I have an SSD for the boot drive an a HDD for my data (all game data). Would this be a viable short term? I plan to get a new system Q1 of next year so the m.2 drive would move over there. My concern is I do not want to impact the Video card so I am not clear on if sticking another card in a PCIe slot would be bad. The thing here is I have money to burn now that I may not have later.

Thanks

 

[dexvx]

Hardly think you're going to notice a difference between 10Gbps M.2 and 20 Gbps M.2 in real world.

 

[mikeo]

I added a samsung M.2 to my old x79 platform, it's really fast with a 2080ti, only issue I had was I had to patch the BIOS to be able to boot from it.

 

[Thevoid230]

Just put the m.2 in the mobo slot unless you are using the bottom sata ports. As devex said, you are unlikely to notice a difference unless you need more than 800MB/s. However, your board does support running x8 x4 x4, so you could run 2 drives in adaptors off the cpu pcie if you really wanted

 

[the snake]

I added a samsung M.2 to my old x79 platform, it's really fast with a 2080ti, only issue I had was I had to patch the BIOS to be able to boot from it.

what mobo was that ?

 

[mikeo]

what mobo was that ?

Asus x79 sabertooth, 3930k. Plan on getting a 16 or 32 core amd next depending on what happens with ryzen 9 or the next threadripper.

 

[ND40oz]

How much do you want to spend?

For motherboards that don't support boot from nvme without a bios hack, you can get bootable m.2 cards.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1351...-bootable-quad-m2-pcie-x16-nvme-ssd-raid-card

 

[Aluminum]

FWIW the bios 'hack' isn't hard, and isn't an actual hack but really a workaround to put in normal UEFI functions in because vendors abandon stuff so damn fast.

I mean if you're going to point at a $400 card just to boot from it, would make far more sense to just upgrade the platform.

Even 4x4 bifurcation cards are around $50 and work in good modern boards with superior software defined storage, the old RAID vendors are stuck in the past.