NVMe SSD M.2 PCIe to replace HDD

[OneWorld]

Increasingly I am seeing drives desribed as NVMe SSD M.2 PCIe, and it seems of course they can be slotted into a PCIe slot.

Does this mean an NVMe SSD could replace a HDD as the C:(boot) drive, any PC with a PCIe slot and thus get far higher speeds, eg booting up etc. I have a new computer with an NVMe SSD M.2 PCIe and it boots win10 is something like 5 secs, my older PC (i7 with SATA SSD) takes about 25 seconds

[resistorman]

It depends:

https://www.howtogeek.com/404627/what-a ... u-buy-one/

[Luke W]

Does this mean an NVMe SSD could replace a HDD as the C:(boot) drive, any PC with a PCIe slot and thus get far higher speeds, eg booting up etc.

Potentially, but not always! It'll depend on whether your motherboard has an M.2 mounting point(s). PCIe M.2 variants communicate via the PCIe bus, but don't mount in a PCIe slot themselves. A quick search of your motherboard will confirm what connectivity it has.

You can get drop-in PCIe cards that'll hold M.2 drives, but whether they'll work with any given motherboard is outside of my knowledge, I'm afraid!

Something else to keep in mind is that the reason some M.2 drives are described as PCIe, is that you can also get SATA-based M.2 devices, which despite their looks, are still limited to the same speed as their larger counterparts. So simply being M.2 doesn't necessarily equal blazing speeds.

[sonics]

You can get drop-in PCIe cards that'll hold M.2 drives, but whether they'll work with any given motherboard is outside of my knowledge, I'm afraid!

Yes, that can indeed work well if your motherboard doesn't have the M.2 slots. My sample libraries run of NVMe drives mounted like that. (My motherboard has M.2 slots as well.)

Check your motherboard specs to see what type of drives and speeds it'll support.

[merlyn]

There are different kinds of PCIe slot -- X1, X4, X8, X16. The numbers refer to how many PCIe lanes are available. An NVMe SSD uses 4 lanes, so the slot would need to a minimum of X4.

There is usually one X16 slot on a motherboard for the graphics card. There may be another slot the same size, but these are usually X8, and to tell the difference you have to look closely at the number of electrical connectors in the slot, or read the motherboard manual. A slot can be X16 size, but only have half the connectors wired up. A X16 card will work at X8, just slower.

There are PCIe cards into which you can screw one or more M.2 NVMe SSDs. So with a X8 slot you would think you could have 2 SSDs. Not always, as the slot has to be able to be split into X4+X4 rather than X8, which not all motherboards do. A single NVMe SSD will work though.

[tea for two]

Dell all in one desktop I had recently with built in 24inch screen had 7200rpm 2.5inch drive as standard wind boot.
Opening up the dell there was a Nvme m.2 80mm ssd slot. So I purrchased a Western Digital WD SN720 Nvme m.2 80mm ssd (nooot a sata m.2 80mm ssd as these sata m.2 ssd have same connection yet are far slower as slow as 2.5inch ssd).

I cloned what I had to from 7200rpm boot wind onto WD Nvme.
I then took out the 7200rpm 2.5inch drive. Checked wind booted fine from WD Nvme.
It did.
I reinserted 7200rpm boot wind drive.
Now when powering on the dell I had 2 options to boot from in wind boot splash screen.
I chose WD Nvme to boot wind from as I gave it a name I would recognise. This enabled me to use for storage 7200rpm boot wind that was inside dell.

[OneWorld]

I have just checked the motherboard make & model and it gives the following...'Can of Worms'

[sonics]

Yes, but there are plenty of worm canners here...
Make, model and board version will suffice.

[merlyn]

I think I had that motherboard back in the day ...

Do you know if you boot with MBR or UEFI?

• Old
  BIOS
  Hard drive
  MBR

• New
  UEFI
  NVMe
  GPT

NVMe drives should be formatted with GPT (GUID Partition Table, not artificial stupidity) and boot with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). If your motherboard is older than that, this could be a non-starter.

[tea for two]

Back in the day when I had an Apple Mirror Drive door tower still one of my fave tower designs, I did an apple mini hackintosh using a dell mini computer which had to get around that the apple mini had EFI whilst the dell mini had MBR.
Nowadays UEFI, GUID is on both apple and wind mobos.

The mobos I used in 2018 with Nvme ssd to assembull AMD Ryzen and Intel 8th gen computers I just went into UEFI BIOS if I recall to change settings. Same as I did with my dell when I installed a Nvme ssd into it alongside its existing 7200rpm drive.

[merlyn]

Sorry to hear about your wind, tea for two.

[tea for two]

Sorry to hear about your wind, tea for two.

[OneWorld]

I think I had that motherboard back in the day ...

Do you know if you boot with MBR or UEFI?

• Old
  BIOS
  Hard drive
  MBR

• New
  UEFI
  NVMe
  GPT

NVMe drives should be formatted with GPT (GUID Partition Table, not artificial stupidity) and boot with UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface). If your motherboard is older than that, this could be a non-starter.

The idea was a flight of fancy and it appears the whole idea isn't worth the effort seeing as I have a brand new NVMe SSD waiting to be put into service which boots in a few seconds, it's amazing. But I have yet to install all my apps and VSTs and update them and activated them etc I thought to myself if I could fit NVMe drive into my existing computer, and having made a drive image, restore the image to the NVMe, then off I go, but that's me, pathologically optimistic, my pals wonder whether I was born in Disney Land!

[merlyn]

It might work, it might not. If you want to know beforehand whether it will work or not you will have to do some research.

In tea for two's working example I imagine the bootloader is on the old drive. In the first part of the boot the motherboard reads from the storage medium. It used to be the Master Boot Record, which is the first part of the drive, now it's the EFI partition, which you have to tell the motherboard where it is. (If you use Windows that's done automatically).