AM3+ Board and NVMe SSD in PCIe slot

[Guest]

I have Gigabyte 880GM USB3 Rev 3.1 board (mfd year 2011) with AMD Athlon X2 CPU. Currently I am running Windows 7 64 on it. The board is equipped with Hybrid EFI BIOS (it’s traditional BIOS only but it enables GPT boot off > 2 TB HDD) It has PCIe 2.0 X16 slot (unused) More details here

There are M.2 PCIe adapters that enable you to connect M.2 NVMe SSD to a PCIe slot. The NVMe M.2 Slot is on the adapter board and the board fits into PCIe slot on the motherboard.

So if I buy NVMe SSD and using such an adapter plug it into the PCIe X16 slot, will it get detected on this AM3+ board? Does anything apart from presence of PCIe 2.0 X16 slot on this board is needed to make it work?

Does BIOS need to have any special capabilities to detect & enable booting off such a configuration?
Alternatively will I at least be able to use it as a secondary device in my system?
Any clarity on above would be great to know.

Thanks.

 

[13thmonkey]

Secondary device will probably be ok, as drivers can be used in windows to detect it.

As boot disk you at least need to be able to boot from PCI-E, which is not that common.

 

[Eximo]

Depends on what you plan to do with such a drive. More than likely you could get it to work in Windows. But you almost certainly couldn't use it as a boot drive. I suspect NVMe and TRIM might also be outside your grasp due to the OS.

You should stick to regular SATA SSDs, you'll get 95% of the normal everyday performance. NVMe doesn't do a whole lot for the end user experience, great for throughput, but that doesn't come up too often.

 

[Calvin7]

Motherboard does not support NVMe storage. You would need modified BIOS that is not available from Gigabyte or something like Clover.
https://www.win-raid.com/t2375f50-Guide-NVMe-boot-without-modding-your-UEFI-BIOS-Clover-EFI-bootloader-method.html

 

[marskoikotik]

Hello, thought i clarify some doubts in this thread.. I installed an ADATA 256 GB NVME SSD (XPG x8200 pro) in AM3+ MSI 970 gaming motherboard with adapter to PCIe. Of course booting is impossible without bios modifications. Otherwise works fine. Trim available. Seq read/write speed up to ~1.6 /1.0 GB.