Humor an Old Timer: NVME M.2 and Ivy Bridge (Just making sure I got this correct!)

[kumquatq3]

I saw this question being asked in other threads, but went unanswered a lot, and I don't see a sticky/guide for it, so:


3570k
Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H: http://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z77X-UD5H-rev-11#sp
1 x PCI Express slot running at x8 (PCIEX8) available (sole x16 taken by a GTX 980)
Samsung SSD 830

Questions:

1. If I get a M.2 PCI adapter, as long as I don't use it as a boot drive (ie only install games on it), the drive *should* work, correct? I read that Ivy Bridge can't use it as a boot drive, without getting fancy in the bios.

2. Based on PCI-E x8, will I see a meaningful increase over my 830 Samsung?

Thank you in advance!

-JG

 

[mcnumpty23]

no you wont see a noticeable difference over a samsung 830

m2/pci-e x4 drives only really shine when copying to/from something else as fast as they are

with out the other thing as fast to copy to/from a good ssd is just so fast anyway you wont notice the difference

 

[SchizTech]

1. It should, though..

2. There will be better benchmark scores but that might not be noticeable in real use (for typical uses)

 

[iamacow]

Yes if you don't want to get fancy and make it your boot drive, you can plug it in any 4x PCIE slot or above. Performance wise unless it is a NVME M.2 card it will not preform any better than the newest SSDs (max 500 Read/Write). Not because of bandwidth but because the nand ASCI controllers suck which is why NVME protocols came along.

Games may load faster, Really once you go with any SSD the difference after that is minimal unless you are moving 50GB at a time.

 

[kumquatq3]

Appreciate all the quick feedback, you guys saved me some hassle and money, thank you!

 

[mcnumpty23]

Appreciate all the quick feedback, you guys saved me some hassle and money, thank you!

you are welcome

and i actually have

1 samsung 830

1 samsung 840

1 samsung 850 evo

2 x 850 evos in raid

and a sm951 nvme m2 x4 pci-e drive lol

so have done a bit of testing of various configurations

only when copying to/from the raided 850 evos and the m2 drive do you see the real life benefit of the m2

 

[karatekid430]

If I remember correctly, I got my old X79 Ivy Bridge-E system to boot off a Samsung 950 Pro with a PCIe x4 to M.2 card in a PCIe x16 slot off the CPU (Asus Rampage IV Formula, i7-4930K).

That might mean that some mainstream Ivy Bridge systems have boot support in the BIOS. I guess the way to find out is to use UEFITool to open the BIOS ROM file from the motherboard's support download page on the manufacturer's website and see if the "nvme" section exists. Mine has GUID "634E8DB5-C432-43BE-A653-9CA2922CC458" and text "nvme". If that is present, it is likely it can boot from NVMe.

But just a warning, it could be glitchy or result in blue screen of death at times on older motherboards. It might not be either, but you cannot trust vendors to reliably maintain older products - it is called obsolescence and it is likely part of their business model.

https://github.com/LongSoft/UEFITool/releases

Ivy Bridge bought support for PCIe 3.0, which makes it worth while if you are not CPU-limited (if you are video editing then a new Ryzen with eight cores might be needed to make the most of it).

If you are willing to fork out for an Intel Optane drive (Intel 800p, 900p or 905p) and attach to a free PCIe x4 or greater slot, you might feel the difference in responsiveness versus a regular SSD, because these excel at random operations at low queue depths (where the vast majority of real world operations are). But you will be paying high $/gigabyte for Optane.

Normal flash-based SSDs will probably show benefit somewhat versus a cheap SATA SSD in real world usage, but not so much compared to a "pro" SATA SSD.

Part of the appeal of NVMe for people like me is the mindset, knowing it is modern, efficient and has extra head-room. It eliminates SATA, the ancient middle-man and just uses the PCIe directly. NVMe is also designed with flash in mind, whereas AHCI and SATA are of the mechanical drive era, and even if made faster than 6Gb/s, they will show their age more and more as SSDs get faster. NVMe can exploit the parallelism of modern SSD controllers, and will continue to be efficient as things scale over time.

I know this post was a year or so ago but I thought I would add my comment for people reading this now, to help them find out if their motherboard can boot from NVMe.