Optiplex 3040 M.2 SSD

matt167

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I have an Optiplex 3040 SFF for my plex server. I'm putting in a cheap video card ( Radeon R7 450 4gb ) so that I can stream some simple games out via Steam Link. One thing I would like is an NVME drive. The 3040 has the traces for the M.2 slot but no slot. Could I use a cheap PCIE 1x m.2 adapter to have a bootable drive?
 
Save yourself the trouble and use a SATA drive.
That is my normal go to with these types of systems. But this one I was considering because there is only space for one hard drive and the possibility of it working. It came with a 500gb drive. Enough space for plenty older games. This is my newest Optiplex. My normals are the 3rd and 4th gen Intels. I’m generally partial to the 7010s
 
It has two SATA ports. Just have to give up the optical drive.
That wouldn’t be ideal. I do all of my movie rips for plex with that box. The drive is used all the time. I guess a pcie sata adapter might work as well and I could use a sata Y power adapter out of the junk bin to power it
 
Something like this should work as long as the BIOS/UEFI can boot from NVMe, which it should be able to.

A x4 card will not physically fit a x1 slot (you can butcher it so it will fit, or you can just buy a x1 adapter).

As for booting, some machines of this era (2015) can boot from nvme, some can't. If you are comfortable modifying the BIOS (not as hard as it sounds), then yes.
 
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is 1x pcie nvme controller faster than SATA? Or is it a rabbit hole not worth it? Assuming it’s not bootable I could use it for internal storage
 
Dell lists it as Pcie gen 3 in the specs. But I’m curious if a pcie 1x sata adapter wouldn’t be better for my uses Somewhere I have a 2x 2.5” to 3.5” hdd bracket, and the hard drive it came with is 2.5” so I could put an SSD in, use a y splitter to power the SSD and hard drive and hook the hard drive up to the pcie card. An nvme would be the cleaner option though. I could add a second sata ssd with the sata option though
 
That Asus web page is just another mistake. Nobody is going to put an expensive pcie switch in a low end system. For what purpose? There's no reason to do it, makes no sense.
 
There were a lot of motherboards from the mid to late 2010s that had PCIe switches on them to allow more than 16x 3.0 lanes for multiple 16x 3.0 slots.

Yeah I owned one of them. Completely different situation. Again, what you are supposing just doesn't make sense.
 
matt167, do whatever makes you happy.
 
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I see the limitation on the 1x slot. That comes from chipset so makes perfect sense. X16 comes from processor so that would be gen 3 X16 just like the documentation. Question is would it be slower than sata ssd? It is the cleaner internal storage solution for sure
 
I decided to go for it. $38 for a 256gb drives, the adapter was $8 and a cheap heat sink.
 
Well that card was a flop. It doesn’t even detect, and it look’s pretty janky. So I’ll put the SSD in an enclosure and use it for games. Are the X2 variants of team group sata ssds decent? I was looking at a 512gb for almost exactly $25 to meet amazons minimum for free shipping since I got tired of paying for prime
 
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