Will M.2 SSD boot from Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6 PCI-E?

[JPollack]

The motherboard is quite old (bought it at 2008) but works great. I am not sure if the motherboard supports the M.2 SSD over PCI-E as boot disk? Will there be issues with the BIOS (installed the latest F8D) or drivers? What would be the alternative solution?


The plan is to buy a new:
* M.2 SSD
* M.2 SSD to PCI-E adapter card. Example Akasa specification
** M.2 PCIe 3.0 x4 to PCIe x4 host adapter <-- Is it compatible with motherboard's PCI-E 2.0?
** Fit in PCIe x4, x8 and x16 slot
** http://www.akasa.com.tw/update.php?tpl=product/product.detail.tpl&no=181&model=AK-PCCM2P-01

Why I do not want to use SATA interface?
* The motherboard has only 3Gb/s SATA 2.0 interface
* Even 6Gb/s SATA 3.0 SSD is slow compared to M.2 over PCI-E if I upgrade the MB.
* Even if the proposed solution does not perform at full speed the M.2 SSD is future proof!


Gigabyte GA-X38T-DQ6 (since 2007):
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-X38T-DQ6-rev-10

Specification
* Chipset
** North Bridge: Intel® X48 Chipset
** South Bridge: Intel® ICH9R
* Expansion Slots
** 2 x PCI Express 2.0 x16 slots (The PCIE_16_1 slot supports x16; the PCIE_16_2 supports x16.)
** 3 x PCI Express x1 slots (share with the PCIE_16_2 slot)

 

[drtweak]

I HIGHLY doubt you can make a 10 year old motherboard boot off of something that have only been around for consumer for the past 2-3 years. It CAN be used as a storage drive but I doubt you will be able to boot off of it.

Also unless you plan on transferring BIG files back and fourth between the same NVMe or two different NVMe's, using it for everyday use, even gaming you will see NOT DIFFERENCE between a NVMe ssd that does 2GB a second read vs a SSD that does 500MB a second. Honently I would just buy a SSD and toss it on your SATA II. Yes you won't get a 500MB a second if you go back and fourth between SSD's but the main advantage about SSDs that make them fast is not really the fast speeds which is the sequental read and write (Writting big files) but the random reads and writes and the 100 times faster seek time to find a file over a hard drive. THAT is what makes it fast.

I have tossed in SSD's in First gen i5/7 machines and honestly I can not tell a difference in boot time, opening programs etc than a brand new 7th gen i5/7 with a SATA III and same ssd.

If anything buy a bootable SATA III Card then

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

And then there's the BIOS on your 9-year old board, very unlikely it will even list the drive on an expansion card as a boot drive.

Why not replace the HDD with an SSD instead of making it complicated?

 

[JPollack]

I though also that it is highly risky to buy all the stuff and find out that it is not possible to boot from that new disk.

Sad that the AData S511 SATA III has died and I have to get it through again.

I will take your advice and just buy a new SATAIII SSD and toss it to on my system. Maybe I even buy the SATA III PCI-E extension card. Never thought of that. This would double the speed of 3Gb/s to 6Gb/s which is worth the 20€ I think - http://www.i-tec-europe.eu/?t=3&v=382 Hopefully it is bootable