Question Best SSD for ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac

[sehs33]

Hello,

I have ASRock Z87 Extreme6/ac with i7 4770k and I would like to upgrade my current SSD to this
https://www.newegg.com/silicon-power-p34a80-512gb/p/N82E16820301394?reviews=all&Item=N82E16820301394

as a boot drive:

• Will it work with my mother board?
• How is it best to connect it? I have multiple pci-x slots and would rather use on of the smaller ones toward the end of the mobo if it doesn't make a difference
• Having a normal SATA SSD, will the benefit be worth it?

Thanks for the help

 

[herrwizo]

It will not work as a boot drive unless you first flash your mobo to beta BIOS version 2.6 or 2.7, which are the only 2 versions supporting NVMe drives. You can find them here (bottom part):

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z87 Extreme6ac/#BIOS

Also, which is quite obvious, you will have to buy a PCI-e to M.2 card with PCI-e 3.0 x4 support.

The smaller PCI-e slots do not provide adequate bandwidth for this drive. You will have to use one of the 3 larger slots. Since all of them are PCI-e 3.0, and the slowest of them runs at x4, you are all set and should be able to fully utilize it.

Benefits as compared to normal SATA drive are small, and even negligible in practice. Maybe several seconds at boot, and that's it. You would have to constantly copy large files, perform video editing, work with large databases or similar activities to see a worthwhile difference.

One final tip: partition the drive as GPT; do not use MBR, because you won't be able to boot from the drive.

 

[sehs33]

It will not work as a boot drive unless you first flash your mobo to beta BIOS version 2.6 or 2.7, which are the only 2 versions supporting NVMe drives. You can find them here (bottom part):

https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z87 Extreme6ac/#BIOS

Also, which is quite obvious, you will have to buy a PCI-e to M.2 card with PCI-e 3.0 x4 support.

The smaller PCI-e slots do not provide adequate bandwidth for this drive. You will have to use one of the 3 larger slots. Since all of them are PCI-e 3.0, and the slowest of them runs at x4, you are all set and should be able to fully utilize it.

Benefits as compared to normal SATA drive are small, and even negligible in practice. Maybe several seconds at boot, and that's it. You would have to constantly copy large files, perform video editing, work with large databases or similar activities to see a worthwhile difference.

One final tip: partition the drive as GPT; do not use MBR, because you won't be able to boot from the drive.

Many thanks for taking the time to look into this and for the detailed answer, I highly appreciate it. Am changing the current SSD anyway and was hoping to get the best thing available, but based on the valuable info you shared NVMe drives are gonna cost more and wont be that practical.

Is there anything better than just another 2.5 SSD?

Thanks again