- May 29, 2011
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If I were to purchase a datacenter-style SSD that goes into the PCIe x16 slot, would I be able to boot from it via NVMe? Or do mobos only recognize NVMe SSDs if they're plugged into the M.2 slot?
Actually, this discussion has me thinking about z68 (gen-3) and z77 motherboards running in my household. I'm PRETTY SURE they have UEFI BIOSes. I KNOW that they provide PCIE v.3.0 bandwidth, if -- if! -- the processor is an Ivy Bridge as opposed to Sandy. But I didn't want to mess around experimenting with NVME drives in those boxes. And -- why invest even the low price for an NVME drive for such an experiment, for systems with processors of those generations? Moms and Bro are perfectly happy with SATA SSD boot disks.You need UEFI as others said as your bios, and have it be able to boot from a PCI-E.
It would help to know what board you wish to install that nVME.
If you do not have the option to boot from nVME which is bios level UEFI feature, then no you will not be able to boot from it, without using some form of customized bios.
Actually, this discussion has me thinking about z68 (gen-3) and z77 motherboards running in my household. I'm PRETTY SURE they have UEFI BIOSes. I KNOW that they provide PCIE v.3.0 bandwidth, if -- if! -- the processor is an Ivy Bridge as opposed to Sandy. But I didn't want to mess around experimenting with NVME drives in those boxes. And -- why invest even the low price for an NVME drive for such an experiment, for systems with processors of those generations? Moms and Bro are perfectly happy with SATA SSD boot disks.
I get flak here all the time for the "thing I've done" to all my systems. A $30 piece of software from a company in Shanghai is the center of all of it: PrimoCache by Romex Software. They have a lively and robust forum of users.I have a gen 2 sandy bridge system (core i5-2400). I added a couple of nvme disks on pcie adapter boards. They work fine as data disks, but as you say, there's no way to use them as boot disks, because the bios doesn't know they exist.
I think there is software that can do it, but it's too complicated to set up (for me, at least). I haven't seen anything that would work for us dummies
I also use a sata 3 ssd for boot disk, and it works good enough, but nowhere near as fast as the nvme data disks, even though mine are only running at pcie gen 2.
A 256GB NVME is enough, but I'm not sure you can buy them that small anymore!
You know? You're absolutely positively right with this. Even so, I just took another look at the Samsung offerings. The Pro models only come with a minimum 500GB capacity, but the EVOs -- in the 970 line -- can be had as 256GB for about $60. And I think I"ll have a look at those EBay jobs you mention.Duck, look on ebay. I've had no problem finding new nvme disks which were pulled from new computers to upgrade them. I've only seen small ones, like 128 or 256 GB. The ones I bought showed only a few hours and power cycles.
Same for small 2.5" 7200 rpm hard drives. I've bought several 500 GB pulls for less than $20, which I use for usb backup drives.
So far, I've not been burned on any of these "pulls".
See -- you're proving my hypothesis right there. The sequential benchmarks show it.I thought PCIE gen 3 was almost twice as fast as gen 2 ?
As a reference point, I have a samsung SAMSUNG MZVLB256HBHQ-000L7 256.0 GB nvme drive on an adapter card plugged into a gen 2 PCIE slot. I believe the drive is pcie gen 3, but the slot is only gen 2.
Crystal disk mark (quick 16MiB test) shows:
[Read]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 1668.270 MB/s
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 1195.847 MB/s
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 976.960 MB/s
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 36.143 MB/s
[Write]
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 8, T= 1): 1545.793 MB/s
Sequential 1MiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 1176.494 MB/s
Random 4KiB (Q= 32, T=16): 803.265 MB/s
Random 4KiB (Q= 1, T= 1): 75.833 MB/s
I have no idea if this is normal or not, but it's plenty fast for me, especially on an old sandy bridge rig.
For the lifetime license price, at a very, very bare minimum -- "It does no harm". That being said, I've been happier than a pig-in-s*** to use it for the last (. . . mmmm . . . ) seven years.
That's a good question, and the elements of it were always in the back of my mind, given the online research I did to find PrimoCache.Sounds wonderful.
I wonder why there is no open source software that is similar. It must be very difficult to write this type software.
If you are using a program like Macrium Reflect to backup all of your persistent storage -- NVME, SATA SSD and HDD -- a program like Macrium will throw up a message that it is about to start a scheduled backup. I have mine scheduled for every morning at 9AM, excluding Saturday and Sunday.
I was thinking the same thing . . . I'll have to poke around and see what can be done.If primo has a command line interface, you might be able to schedule a command to pause it. Maybe at 8:55, or something like that. And another later to re-enable it.
Just a thought.
Here's the ROMEX PrimoCAche explanation of their CLI.If primo has a command line interface, you might be able to schedule a command to pause it. Maybe at 8:55, or something like that. And another later to re-enable it.
Just a thought.
Here's the ROMEX PrimoCAche explanation of their CLI.
PrimoCache Command Line Interface
You would have two executions of their program mentioned in the explanation: one with parameters that would pause each cache, and a second with commands that would resume each cache task.
Yes -- that's true. I think Macrium offers you a set of "canned strategies" but otherwise let's you choose your preferences as a custom configuration. I set mine up to do a full backup once a month, a differential backup on Mondays, and incremental backups for the remainder of the business week. So the incremental backups always take mere minutes, while the Monday backups can take as long as an hour, and those full backups take more time than that.Exactly. Schedule pause command right before your 9:00 backup, and schedule the resume command after an amount of time that you think the backup runs. You might look at the macrium logs to see if you can determine how long the backup takes to run. Good luck!
I think there is software that can do it, but it's too complicated to set up (for me, at least). I haven't seen anything that would work for us dummies