The reason I want to boot from it is my current 250GB SSD is getting filled up. I primarily use my machine for DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) related work and use it only as a boot drive/software drive....thus the reason to upgrade to a larger boot drive.
I'm using Win10 Pro x64 and if all that's needed is a driver, that's excellent news!! I just wanted to make sure this is correct as my motherboard is about 5 years old (pre-NVMe days).
Regarding the bios mod: if it's not too complicated I don't mind giving it a shot, but don't want to be with my machine being unusable.
This guy at the AsRock forums found a solution (see the last post):
http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts...tle=z77-extreme-4-nvme-pcie-ssd-booting#51247
Is that "IT" then? You can make an NVME boot if the motherboard accommodates UEFI?
Somehow, I may have picked up the appropriate assumptions about this when I belatedly chose to investigate NVME M.2 in October, 2016 with my sig/Skylake system. [Dang! This thing is so--o-oo-o--oo good!]
After struggling to install Win 7 with slipstreamed drivers, then following a Win 10 install to its own system-volume, I decided I had to convert the entire enchilada to GPT and UEFI. That was the imperative for my Z170 system, but there are UEFI options in my Z68 Gen3 BIOS.
For me, it wouldn't have mattered so much if the NVME isn't bootable. I'd install a top-end SATA SSD, add a PCIE x4 NVME M.2 in the bottom x4 slot of the mobo, and use it to cache the SSD and any additional SATA SSDs or HDDs (with a much greater payoff for the HDDs.)
I will not lay it out for you unless you ask for details -- I've acquired the reputation of "caching hot-dawg."
But judging from the Z68 and Z170 systems where I've configured it, it is rock-solid, tip-top, and requiring only so much maintenance for someone with the time and experience to work with it.
I think I'm going to inventory my free PCIE slots on two older systems and then find myself a couple good 250GB NVME drives . . . . In fact, I think I'll take another peek at an Optane Intel 900P drive again. Sooner or later, I shall send the purchase order to myself over in "Hardware Acquisition."