Any tricks for booting M.2 SSD when system BIOS doesn't support that?

[rseiler]

I have an Intel board, the DZ68BC, which I've all but confirmed will not only not boot M.2 NVMe SSD (using an M.2-PCIe adapter, as the board has no M.2 slot), but won't boot M.2 AHCI, either. Furthermore, no more BIOS's are forthcoming, and from what I've read elsewhere, modifying the BIOS to add this support to Intel boards is all but impossible, unlike some other brands.

OK, so beyond that, is there anything else, or is SATA SSD it (thinking boot drives only, not a secondary drive, which would work)?

Perhaps a controller (instead of a mere adapter) that has its own BIOS, or a drive that somehow also has built-in capabilities to work around the problem?

 

[USAFRet]

You're almost certainly out of luck. And even if you did get it working, I highly doubt you'd see any actual performance benefit over a regular SATA III SSD.

 

[rseiler]

I suspected that it wasn't possible, but I didn't want to assume that it wasn't with so much creativity out there.

As for performance, that's a surprise, and would definitely be a decider, since that's all I'm after in the end. I knew there would be some hit, but with a PCI-E 2.0 x16 (16 active lanes) slot available to it, I thought it would be at least 2x.

 

[USAFRet]

A NVMe drive compared to a SATA III drive is faster. In a system that can handle it.
In your case, the rest of the system would choke things.

Additionally, for the actual OS drive, it is not as cut and dried as 'faster drive'.
Benchmarks may look good, but does that actually translate into a faster user experience? Often, not.

For instance:
A Samsung 500GB SATA III drive as OS drive, running normally.
Same drive, but instead with RapidMode via Samsung.

Benchmarks (CrystalDiskMark) show it almost 10x 'faster'. 550 vs 4300.
Actual day to day user operation? I pretty much can't tell the difference.

 

[rseiler]

OK, but benchmarks vs perception aside, in this case I assume you're talking about PCIe not being 3.0? Because aside from that (and the fact that the drive can't be booted--let's forget about that and pretend that it could be), I'm at a loss to understand what the impediment would be. It shouldn't be RAM or CPU.

 

[USAFRet]

OK, but benchmarks vs perception aside, in this case I assume you're talking about PCIe not being 3.0? Because aside from that (and the fact that the drive can't be booted--let's forget about that and pretend that it could be), I'm at a loss to understand what the impediment would be. It shouldn't be RAM or CPU.

No, I'm talking more about the actual use case, and what type of files are used as part of the OS.
The large number you see for m.2 drives vs SATA III is basically for large sequential files.

As opposed to the thousands of tiny files that are actually used in the OS operation.

You might then ask...
Ah, but what about the difference between a SSD and an HDD?

The SSD and m.2 shine compared to the HDD due to the near instantaneous seek time. Vs. a spinning patter and moving heads.


Actual performance? Maybe something like this, opening a complex Excel file or game level:
HDD - 5 secs.
SATA SSD - 0.5 sec.
m.2 SSD - 0.4 sec.
(not actual numbers, but that's the general idea)

Yes, the m.2 is faster. But maybe not so you'd actually notice.