Question Is it possible to connect a PCie drive to a SATA slot?

Jan 14, 2025
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I have an ancient PC, with only SATA connections, that I will be upgrading in the near future, but for now I need more storage.
If I get a PCie m.2 NVMe SSD is there a converter I can get to allow me to connect it to my SATA slots?
 
I have an ancient PC, with only SATA connections, that I will be upgrading in the near future, but for now I need more storage.
If I get a PCie m.2 NVMe SSD is there a converter I can get to allow me to connect it to my SATA slots?
How old is the PC?
Because if it has PCIe slots, I would just get a PCIe card to NVMe adaptor and use that until you can plug the drive into the new machine.

Another solution would be putting the NVMe drive in an external heatsink enclosure and run it off the usb port.
 
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An expansion card most likely won't be bootable. A plain SATA SSD can be bootable even on VERY old motherboards.
once it passes the interrupt from the onboard controller, it will pick it up in the slots. This is how I boot old mac pro towers with windows.

I haven't seen that being an issue since the slot II CPU days.

But to be fair, he was just adding storage and not replacing the boot drive. And if he was going to boot from it I would suggest a usb enclosure for a nmve because it will boot faster than waiting for the controller to time out at every boot.
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once it passes the interrupt from the onboard controller, it will pick it up in the slots. This is how I boot old mac pro towers with windows.

I haven't seen that being an issue since the slot II CPU days.

But to be fair, he was just adding storage and not replacing the boot drive.
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I had this board paired with an i5-3570k.
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z77X-D3H-rev-10#ov
2012

Booting from something in a PCIe slot was not a thing.
 
Booting from something in a PCIe slot was not a thing.
Its been around forever in industrial setting and not home. And it was always there except the interrupt location changed on 64 bit vs 32/16 bit systems. There has only been a few exceptions out there where the interrupt was reserved. Depending on the board, some you had to enable the pass on the interrupt or 'boot to other device'

But booting the drive is off topic here. So if you want to have a discussion about this we can continue this in a separate thread.
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Its been around forever in industrial setting and not home. And it was always there except the interrupt location changed on 64 bit vs 32/16 bit systems. There has only been a few exceptions out there where the interrupt was reserved. Depending on the board, some you had to enable the pass on the interrupt or 'boot to other device'

But booting the drive is off topic here. So if you want to have a discussion about this we can continue this in a separate thread.
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Well, industrial boards, yes.