NVME and SATAe on my x99 board

[Insomniator]

Hey everyone -- I have an old x99 board with a 10 GB/s M.2 slot and also a 10 GB/s Sata Express port.

http://www.gigabyte.us/Motherboard/GA-X99M-Gaming-5-rev-10#ov

In the near future I'll likely be upgrading my boot drive to a NVME M.2 drive -- is NVME a motherboard or SSD side feature? Can my board take advantage of an NVME drive because it has a 10GB M.2 port even though its too old to list NVME as a supported feature?

My other question is regarding SATAe -- I'll also possibly be upgrading my data drive to an SSD and wonder if any 2.5" drives actually use this port. Doesn't seem to be much info about it!

Thanks!

 

[Billy Tallis]

When you say "10 GB/s M.2 slot", what you probably mean is that your motherboard's M.2 slot is wired for a PCIe 2.0 x2 connection, which has a raw data rate of 10Gb/s (not 10GB/s). That slot is mechanically and electrically compatible with any NVMe M.2 SSD, though it is much slower than the PCIe 3.0 x4 connection supported by most M.2 NVMe SSDs. It will be an occasional botteneck on all but the slowest M.2 NVMe SSDs, but the connection is almost twice as fast as SATA.

Your motherboard only needs to support NVMe in its firmware if you want to boot from the NVMe SSD. Otherwise, NVMe is purely a software feature that is relevant to the operating system but not to the motherboard hardware.

It looks like there was a firmware update issued by Gigabyte in January 2015 that added NVMe support, so if you've kept up with your motherboard firmware updates, then you should be able to boot from a NVMe SSD. If you see any settings mentioning NVMe in the motherboard's firmware configuration tool, then you've probably got a new enough firmware version.

 

[Insomniator]

Yeah my bad I meant to say 10 Gb/s -- it's a PCI-E x2 M.2 slot. Not x4 unfortunately. Pretty lame!

SOOO my question would be -- is it worth it or possible to use a PCIe 3.0 x4 adapter for a boot drive? I have a free PCIe 3.0 x16 slot. If a 950 Evo/pro can reach speeds up to 3200/1500 MB/s it seems like my motherboards M.2 slot will bottleneck it quite badly.

I'm aware I'd probably never notice the difference either way, but an adapter like this is only 15 bucks so why not if it actually works -- https://www.amazon.com/XinYS-Expres...01M8IF0FF/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8

 

[Smoblikat]

Its only worth it if you already have the drive, otherwise you will never notice a difference between SATA and M.2, except for higher CPU overhead and heat from the M.2 drive.

Its also quite possible that it will work, ive had a 100% success rate in adding NVMe modules to boards that didnt natively support it.