Is Mobo with M.2 Slot capable of booting off it?

[rohitgangal80]

Hi,
Several motherboards these days come with M.2 Slot for SATA or PCIe NVMe SSDs.
Can it be safely assumed that a PC built using one of these motherboards and installed with M.2 either SATA or PCIe NVME SSD (As supported) can actually boot off it?

Should I dig deep into specifications if they would in any way be indicative that the SSD in M.2 Slot may only be used as a Data Drive?

My next PC is likely to have only M.2 NVMe SSD say 512 MB and that's it, no other drive connected to SATA port.
OS would be Windows 10 or may be 7 with patching for drivers.

So I should not land into a situation where the system can not boot off M.2 device, just in case.

Is there any hidden spec I should be looking for just in case applicable?
Thank you.

 

[Peter Martin]

If they have a specific M.2 slot Then they can boot off it. Make sure to get the PCIe drive And a motherboard that supports

 

[karenjoly]

Mr Martin is of course accurate but I would add the following comments. Even as a recent participant on this board, I am surprised by the number of users looking for help installing / booting from an NVMe drive such that it must surely be the #1 topic in the storage forum, and I have found it a highly fruitless exercise to help some of these lost souls.

My comment is offered in the obvious context of the many thousands of owners/companies who have bought the drives and use them error free. I am one. Still, such success does not help address the issues presented here, that the user cannot have the drive operate as expected and help is short on the ground, or so it would seem, ( its always the case that only part of the history of the problem computer's OS is presented, so only part of the current situation is described, and that the PEBKAC principle still applies). Still I and others have noted the issue does legitimately arise when one would think it would be a super simple install.

Long story short, it seems to me that the one caveat I can add to a purchase decision is that success may hinge more on the make of the motherboard than that of the drive and I have seen fewer problems with high end ASUS products than others.

I agree with your research project, well done in advance of a momentous decision rather than after, as is so often the case. But regarding your disk strategy, the plan is for only one drive ? Nugatory. I say buy at least two, not to failsafe the NVMe in particular but to have one as a system backup drive, OS and all. Do this and you can feel warm and fuzzy after all.

 

[Calvin7]

About 99% of motherboards sold with M.2 storage connectors can boot from the M.2 drive. On early models some required PCIe drives and not SATA M.2.

Asus had a AM3 board with an M.2 that was data only. They explained that in the manual.

 

[USAFRet]

Not always.
Or at least, not without 3rd party workarounds and custom BIOS.

For instance...an older Z97 board. Some can, some can't boot off an m.2 drive.

New boards? Almost certainly yes.


And of course, you have to pay close attention to m.2 NVMe vs m.2 SATA...:lol:
Not all m.2 ports can take both type of drives.

 

[rohitgangal80]

Thank you all. So it seems though in general it should work, there might be some caveats. So my next action would be to seek pre-sales support from the motherboard vendors and get an additional confirmation from them. I hope they are knowledgeable enough to address my query! I have seen support personnel giving textbook answers rather than understanding the real question!

And yes, while I will only have NVMe drive as a single storage device in my system, I shall be intermittently connecting my external USB disk to take backups of important data. However I want to avoid falling back to some other SATA drive just because booting off NVMe drive is not feasible.