Question Can PCI-E Riser for NVM.e SSD be used with old PCs?

[jrichrds]

I have some Haswell-era and AMD Phenom II systems, and was wondering whether I can get one of those <$10 PCI-E risers from Amazon to be able to use a much faster NVM.e SSD? Or does the BIOS itself have to support NVM.E SSDs?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Depends. Are you going to want to boot from them? You'll need BIOS support then. If you just want a (non-boot/OS) fast data/scratch drive, then have at it, if you are running Win10.

Even if using as a data/scratch drive, you probably won't get full speed out of it, due to older PCI-E standards on the board(s) that you're using.

I guess, I wouldn't bother, unless you have an existing OS install that you desperately need a faster Photoshop scratch or database or VM drive, and you can't upgrade the platform.

You could investigate "booting with Clover", that might let you boot it, if you have a UEFI BIOS to start with.

 

[jrichrds]

Depends. Are you going to want to boot from them? You'll need BIOS support then. If you just want a (non-boot/OS) fast data/scratch drive, then have at it, if you are running Win10.

Even if using as a data/scratch drive, you probably won't get full speed out of it, due to older PCI-E standards on the board(s) that you're using.

I guess, I wouldn't bother, unless you have an existing OS install that you desperately need a faster Photoshop scratch or database or VM drive, and you can't upgrade the platform.

You could investigate "booting with Clover", that might let you boot it, if you have a UEFI BIOS to start with.

Thank you! I'll pass on trying to do that with those older systems as I want to use it as the boot drive.

How about a new Dell T40 server in which Dell has purposely disabled the on-board PCI-E m.2 NVMe slot in the BIOS? Some with a flash programmer have been able to flash over the workstation version of the BIOS to enable the on-board slot, but I'm not capable of that. Would getting a PCI-E riser likely let me get around this and let me boot from m.2 NVMe SSD? Or is Dell disabling not just the on-board slot itself, but disabling m.2 NVMe SSD support altogether in the BIOS?

 

[razel]

As long as it is PCI-e and the risers are just 'right angle' or physical adapters then it's no issue at all to use nvme ssd. I'm currently using mPCIe to m2 adapters in 3 laptops all the way as far back as Intel Core 2 and they work great. None of them support booting NVME. Booting from NVME drive does require usage of a UEFI shell either Clover (for UEFI BIOS) or DUET (for legacy non-UEFI) on USB or SATA drive.

 

[Hail The Brain Slug]

I used a kryom.2 card to test a 950 pro 512GB in my Z87 4770k system. Despite Samsung magician indicating the drive was appropriately connected at pci-e 3.0x4 I could never get it to achieve sequential over ~1600MB/s. The 950 Pro 512 GB was capable of 2500MB/s on paper and in my X99 system.

Other performance metrics were mildly impacted, as well like randoms and low queue depth sequentials.

Despite it looking to work correctly on paper you may not realize the full potential of nvme drive speeds. I assume it comes down to the specific hardware you're looking at.

 

[jrichrds]

Thank you for the feedback!