M.2 SSD in older motherboard?

[kirkdickinson]

I have an older computer I would like to spruce up a little bit. I am thinking that a really fast boot drive might be the best way. It's an Asus sabertooth x79 board https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131801

It has 3.0 PCI Express 16

I know there are M.2 SSDs that plug into PCI express 4.

Will anything work with this board? If it does work with that board would it be boot-able?

 

[bbhaag]

I don't believe a newer drive using the m.2/nvme interface will be able to be used as a boot drive with your mainboard. Looking at Asus' site I see your board has 2 Intel SATA 6Gb/s ports. Perhaps a more traditional ssd would suffice. They are plenty fast and would help give your aging system a little "pep".

 

[kirkdickinson]

I don't believe a newer drive using the m.2/nvme interface will be able to be used as a boot drive with your mainboard. Looking at Asus' site I see your board has 2 Intel SATA 6Gb/s ports. Perhaps a more traditional ssd would suffice. They are plenty fast and would help give your aging system a little "pep".

I already have an SSD. Had one from day one with this computer. This one was bleeding edge 5 years ago and the CPU is still way up n the list for Passmark scores.

Check out my other thread on this...

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/new-workstation-for-photoshop.2526945/#post-39167274

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I can think of a better solution -- IF you cannot boot an NVME drive from the X79 motherboard. I realized this myself with a newer motherboard running an NVME M.2 boot-system drive.

You can socket up to 64GB of RAM in an ASUS Sabertooth (or similar) X79 motherboard.

If you have 16GB of RAM already, consider doubling it to 32 (or more!!!), but 16 will give you an idea of what you want or need. Buy a lifetime license to Romex Primo-Cache for ~ $30.

Then, cache your SATA SSD to some amount of RAM between 4 and 16GB. A benchmark like Anvil would then show you sustained sequential reads higher than 10,000 MB/s -- after initial execution of this or that program or OS component has occurred. And you can preserve the cache between "Restart" operations of the system.

If you can still add an NVME M.2 drive while booting from the SATA SSD, you could do that as well. But if it's a matter of dollars versus performance, the decision is purely subjective.

Unfortunately, RAM prices are high right now, but adding to RAM by buying an identical kit to what you have now should be competitive to the price of a small NVME M.2 -- between 256 and 512GB.

It's not for everyone, and we can't ignore that the X79 chipset is a bit dated. If it were I, hoping to extend the usefulness of my X79 board, I'd probably do it . . . .

 

[kirkdickinson]

If you have 16GB of RAM already, consider doubling it to 32 (or more!!!), but 16 will give you an idea of what you want or need. Buy a lifetime license to Romex Primo-Cache for ~ $30.

I never heard of that program. Sounds like a more advanced "RAMDrive". I used to play with that back in the 90's a little.

I could always use "Symbolic Links" (Junction Points) to access a faster drive from a directory on a slower one.

I just keep looking at this computer and trying to decide. If I do much upgrading, I may as well build a new computer on a modern motherboard. The thing is, that there really isn't anything that will be much more than 33% faster with Photoshop than the CPU I have.

If I build a new computer with faster single thread CPU and have M.2 memory, I might get up to 50% speed improvement?

I know if I wipe my current system and install Win10 fresh, I will get rid of 5 years of file sludge and have something faster with no parts, but it will take me 3-4 day to reload all my programs and completely set this up to be usable.

I have my boot drive on a Samsung PRO 240 and all my programs on a 500GB 7200 RPM drive. I have thought about getting a 1TB Samsung Pro, putting all my programs and boot on that drive, dual booting until I have the new stuff set up and then using the old 240 as cache for Photoshop etc...

That is probably the most bang for the buck and the 1TB SSD could be used in another system when I pull the trigger on a complete "from the mobo up" rebuild.

 

[ch33zw1z]

That's a solid plan.