PCIe to M.2 - working with an older motherboard.

Josh Weston

New member
Morning all.

Thinking of getting a new SSD for my aged PC (it seems like only yesterday...) and as such i'm obviously intrigued by the M.2 offerings. Unfortunately my motherboard is too old to have a native slot for it, but I've seen a couple of adapters online that can be chucked into a PCIe slot.

My question is whether there's any special firmware requirements needed to actually use the drive as a boot drive.
Would my motherboard simply recognise it as a PCIe device or would it not work at all?

Motherboard's an MSI Z77A-GD65.

Thanks guys.
 
Google will help you there. M.2 should be fine (SATA M.2) but NVME may cause issues. You really need to look around on Google mate.

Good to see you BTW.
 
from my experience.... stay the heck away from these 30$ pci adapters if you want M.2 boot drive.

most of them simply don´t work as boot drives.
i have 6 systems with 5 different boards and chipsets.
4 of the newer boards have NVME boot support in the bios.
even the newer ones have issues with these cheap i-tec, syba, delock, logilink cards.
i tested them just for fun in these mainboards.

the lack of NVME boot support is one reason i decided to update two of my systems to ryzen this year.

these pcie to M.2 adapters may work fine for data drives.

by the way... same goes for cheap PCI to SATA cards.
just read the online reviews (amazon etc).
i tried a bunch of them... nothing but issues.
it seems to be sheer luck if they work or not in a system.

i ended up buying a PCIe SATA card from adaptec that cost me 120+ euro.

could have spend that money on a better mainboard.
but was to lazy to rip the system apart.
 
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