Question On motherboard dual NVME/M.2 slots and the ability to hide them

[BarkingGhostar]

Previously I thought I had little use for pseudo-embedded storage on a motherboard. And while I can appreciate the performance of NVME solid state devices I would only see the usefulness or advantage if a motherboard equipped with two or more M.2 slots can be turned on/off in the BIOS and thus not seen by whatever operating system happens to be running at the time. For those of you that are using NVME OS solutions have any of you done a OS-per-M.2 slot and booted through BIOS slot enable?

Right now I have SATA and power cables sticking out of the PC chassis. I connect an SSD for a given OS I want to run at the moment. If its Windows sometimes I'll connect another SSD to clone/backup but otherwise that SSD is disconnected. I never have more than one boot SSD actually connected so if I wanted to move to motherboard based NVME boot solutions I wonder about the control over them in the BIOS.

Anyone got hands on experience with this?

 

[VirtualLarry]

There was a thread in Storage, with a picture of a removable M.2 bay / dock thingy. Not Hot-swap though. (Not sure how you would hot-swap a boot device anyways.)

I'm honestly not so sure that you can simply totally disable one or more M.2 NVMe slots in the BIOS, so that they completely won't be seen by other OSes on other drives.

Counting on that might be a false hope.

Why not get some 2.5" hot-swap bays that fit into a 3.5" or 5.25" external drive bay, and use that with SATA drives?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

That was me, but I wondered about the on board stuff and the ability to turn them on/off. I thought NVME used on U/M.2 was faster than anything on SATA?

 

[VirtualLarry]

M.2 NVMe IS faster than SATA6G, in basically all cases. But SATA ports can be disabled, I have my doubts over whether the PCI-E lanes on the NVMe slots can. You can't disable GPU slots, can you?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

OK, so I just had to go look on my current mobo, which is 7 years old. And sure enough in the BIOS I can enable/disable SATA ports, and I can turn on/off HotSwap. By default the SATA ports with nothing on them show Disabled, and none of them have HotSwap enabled. Not entirely sure how HS works for an OS drive. Now I wish there were a tool such that I can change BIOS settings from within the various OS's so I could just simply select another SSD and then reboot straight into it while hiding all other bootable devices.

 

[PingSpike]

Never seen that option in bios. I mean, it would be possible create a switch adapter but I've never seen one.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

There is nothing in your BIOS to manage a storage device on the M.2/NVME slot you are using?