[SOLVED] M.2 SSD for Gigabyte H81M-S2PV?

[ray5514]

Hello!

I have been researching SSDs and was hoping for some input and suggestions.

I have a Gigabyte H81M-S2PV and I don't think I can afford to replace it and upgrade my whole system just now, but I want an SSD drive for it.

I was hoping to get an M.2 form factor one that uses NVMe protocol and plugging that into an PCIe adaptor card.

I think that I may not be able to boot off this, but perhaps I can boot off a USB key and then use the ssd for everything else.

The motherboard has the following

1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16
1 x PCI Express x1 slot
(The PCI Express slots conform to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)
2 x PCI slots

and I read on this site that most SSDs would want PCIe 3.0 to be as fast as possible, but I should still be able to get something working I think.

Anyway learning all this has been quite hard so I was hoping someone could tell me if that sounds accurate and which 512GB SSDs you might recommend for this case?

Thanks

 

[ChumP]

Why get through all that hassle with PCIe to M.2 adapter cards when you can just get really close in performance with a good SATA III SSD?

Here's a video from Hardware Unboxed showcasing game loading performance mainly:

View: https://youtu.be/COofLeqk_tM


Real world performance differences like boot times and loading programs will be quite minimal even between a PCIe 4.0 SSDs (which are seriously expensive) and SATA SSDs.
Yes... transfer speeds are much higher on PCIe, but you'll obviously be bottlenecked, usually, by the secondary drive you're transferring to... unless you're transferring to a similar PCIe drive.

If you had a newer platform and support for M.2 NVMe drives, then sure... I see no problem in getting a M.2 drive using the PCIe 3.0 interface, they've come down in price quite significantly lately.

Since you cannot do that... I don't really see any point in trying to make that work. A SATA SSD will feel just as fast as the NVMe in most tasks anyway.

 

[helpstar]

just get a simple fast SATA 2.5" SSD

 

[USAFRet]

SATA III.
Drop in replacement for an HDD.
Will boot from this.
Less cost.
Les hassle.
The only place you'd notice any performance difference is in benchmarks.

 

[USAFRet]

I think that I may not be able to boot off this, but perhaps I can boot off a USB key and then use the ssd for everything else.

No, it doesn't work like that.

 

[ray5514]

Thank you for the advice everyone!