sohosources
n00b
- Joined
- Oct 7, 2006
- Messages
- 58
Hi, gang,
My main productivity PC has been running flawlessly for 5+ years. It's a 4770k clocked at 3.8 GHz on a Z87-A MB with 32 GB DDR3, an old Samsung SSD that boots Win 8.1 (presently) and a bunch of SATA hard drives. The base PC really only hosts a bunch of VMWare virtual PCs that have their respective tasks (Win and Linux). My present VM storage drive is a 512-GB Mushkin SATA SSD. Nothin special, but very reliable.
I have been playing around with Win 10 LTSC VMs to prepare for future necessity, and I had been thinking about getting a 1-TB SSD now that they're cheap. The Mushkin will run out of room with several larger Win 10 installs. I was prepared to buy a 1-TB Sammy or Crucial SATA SSD when I discovered how speedy a native M.2 / NVME drive can be...which got me thinking...
My Z87-A can't boot from a pci-e drive (and I don't want to mess around with putting a minimal bootloader on a SATA drive and then hand the OS drive over to a pci-e drive unless someone figures out a foolproof, idiot-proof method), so I'm expecting to be stuck with a SATA SSD boot/OS drive, but I'm wondering about whether it's reasonable to use a single or dual pci-e/nvme/m.2 adapter (lots on eBay and amazon) with one (and then maybe 2?) 1-TB m.2 drives to host my VMWare images?
The Z87-A has at least one x16 or x8 pci-e version 3 slot open (only vid card in main slot).
Do these adapters work?
Reliability issues?
Performance benefits (or not enough to worry about?)
Thoughts?
As always -- thanks,
--sohosources
My main productivity PC has been running flawlessly for 5+ years. It's a 4770k clocked at 3.8 GHz on a Z87-A MB with 32 GB DDR3, an old Samsung SSD that boots Win 8.1 (presently) and a bunch of SATA hard drives. The base PC really only hosts a bunch of VMWare virtual PCs that have their respective tasks (Win and Linux). My present VM storage drive is a 512-GB Mushkin SATA SSD. Nothin special, but very reliable.
I have been playing around with Win 10 LTSC VMs to prepare for future necessity, and I had been thinking about getting a 1-TB SSD now that they're cheap. The Mushkin will run out of room with several larger Win 10 installs. I was prepared to buy a 1-TB Sammy or Crucial SATA SSD when I discovered how speedy a native M.2 / NVME drive can be...which got me thinking...
My Z87-A can't boot from a pci-e drive (and I don't want to mess around with putting a minimal bootloader on a SATA drive and then hand the OS drive over to a pci-e drive unless someone figures out a foolproof, idiot-proof method), so I'm expecting to be stuck with a SATA SSD boot/OS drive, but I'm wondering about whether it's reasonable to use a single or dual pci-e/nvme/m.2 adapter (lots on eBay and amazon) with one (and then maybe 2?) 1-TB m.2 drives to host my VMWare images?
The Z87-A has at least one x16 or x8 pci-e version 3 slot open (only vid card in main slot).
Do these adapters work?
Reliability issues?
Performance benefits (or not enough to worry about?)
Thoughts?
As always -- thanks,
--sohosources