[SOLVED] Question about booting NVME from PCI-E (Need Help)

[Zeriel00]

Hello, I recently bought this motherboard: https://www.newegg.com/msi-b450-tomahawk-max/p/N82E16813144267?Item=N82E16813144267 (MSI Tomahawk Max II B450) My CPU is a Ryzen 7 - 1700x.

I'm trying to set up 6 hard drives using my SATA ports, but I boot from an M.2 NVME. The motherboard says that using that slot will take away SATA ports 5 and 6 leaving me with only 4.

So I was thinking if I buy an M2 NVME adapter for PCI Express like this one: https://www.newegg.com/riitop-m2t16x-pci-express-to-m-2-card/p/17Z-0061-00078?Description=nvme pci adapter&cm_re=nvme_pci adapter--9SIA6V8B9A5748--Product&quicklink=true

Will my computer be able to boot from there? Also, will I have all 6 SATA ports free to use with my hard drives? or would it be a better idea to buy a SATA PCI-e RAID controller/extension? (These are expensive though)

Thanks!

 

[USAFRet]

Solution:
Buy larger SATA drives, and consolidate from 6 to 4.

Alternate solution:
An external enclosure for a couple of SATA drives.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Will my computer be able to boot from there? Also, will I have all 6 SATA ports free to use with my hard drives?

Yes. Should work.

 

[InvalidError]

That seems strange. One of AMD's biggest advantages until Intel's 11th-gen was having the first NVMe slot directly connected to the CPU over dedicated PCIe x4. Using that slot should have no effect on available SATA ports when using an NVMe SSD.

Since that board has only one M.2 slot, it could be that chipset lanes get diverted to the NVMe slot for SATA/B-key regardless of what it gets populated with.

As for using an add-on board to put NVMe SSDs on it, it shouldn't matter to the BIOS which PCIe lanes the NVMe SSD is attached to. The BIOS has the code blob responsible for recognizing and booting from NVMe drives it finds during PnP enumeration, it should be able to do so regardless of where they are attached on the PCIe device tree.

Note: some motherboards use chipset lanes that are shared with SATA for their secondary x4 (electrical) slot, so you may still end up losing two SATAs. (Probably not the case here with only one NVMe.)