SSD Drive - Using a PCIe 2.0 Add-In Card with NVMe M.2 SSD

[bsntech]

Hi all,

So I have two Kingston V300 SSDNOW 250 GB SSD drives in an Asus M5A97 LE 2.0 motherboard and an AMD FX-8350 processor right now. SATA III connections and my Ubuntu distribution shows they are at 6 gbps.

Motherboard specs:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131872

When I do the 'hdparm -Tt / dev/sdX on the drives, one of them is doing about 229 MB/sec and the other is doing 368 MB/sec.

I just upgraded the firmware on both of them to the latest today - and there was no difference. Based on other reading, I suspect I got one of those 'bad' drives that had cheaper chips and the other one has the better chips.

Anyways, instead of buying another SSD to fix that performance, I was thinking of getting one of these PCI Express add-in cards that has an M.2 slot on it along with a 512 GB M.2 NVMe drive.

The motherboard only has PCI Express 2.0 slots.

Was thinking of buying this adapter:

https://www.amazon.com/Lycom-DT-120-PCIe-Adapter-Support/dp/B00MYCQP38/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1510446176&sr=8-2&keywords=m.2+to+pci+express+adapter

With this NVMe M.2 SSD:

https://www.amazon.com/Black-512GB-Performance-SSD-WDS512G1X0C/dp/B01MR4VOBZ/ref=sr_1_5?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1510446294&sr=1-5&keywords=PCIe+NVMe+ssd

Thoughts are to 'future proof' so I can use the SSD in a new computer in the future if desired.

I really don't know much about this new technology stuff. But as I was looking over some answers on Amazon, someone said that I won't get the performance out of it because only the Ryzen processor supports NVMe. Is that accurate?

I don't really care if I am not getting the full 2,100 MB/sec throughput, but I would hope that I could at least get 1,000 MB/sec, which would be more than double what I get now (or four times the slow drive!). The motherboard shows it has one PCI Express 2.0 port in x4 mode - so wouldn't that mean 2,000 MB/sec with four lanes? Or is there something that the processor/motherboard needs to support on top of it for increased speeds?

Thank you for any help you can provide. Don't want to shell out $230 unless it will increase performance.

 

[Darkbreeze]

No, that is not accurate. Support for M.2 and PCIe drives is not limited to either AMD or Intel. Both have chipsets that support those features. I think the main problem you may encounter though is that some older PCIe 2.0 boards do not support booting from M.2 or PCI devices.

I think yours will support it if you have the most recent BIOS version installed. It's definitely not going to see it's absolute best speeds being limited by the lane speeds in a 2.0 slot, but it should still be considerably faster than a standard SATA SSD.

According to this post, booting from M.2 PCI device on that motherboard model is verified.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3199619/asus-m5a97-supports-pcie-nvme-ssd-boot-device.html

 

[bsntech]

No, that is not accurate. Support for M.2 and PCIe drives is not limited to either AMD or Intel. Both have chipsets that support those features. I think the main problem you may encounter though is that some older PCIe 2.0 boards do not support booting from M.2 or PCI devices.

I think yours will support it if you have the most recent BIOS version installed. It's definitely not going to see it's absolute best speeds being limited by the lane speeds in a 2.0 slot, but it should still be considerably faster than a standard SATA SSD.

According to this post, booting from M.2 PCI device on that motherboard model is verified.

http://www.tomshardware.com/answers/id-3199619/asus-m5a97-supports-pcie-nvme-ssd-boot-device.html

I actually just loaded the newest version of the bios firmware today as well - version 2701. Of course, didn't really see any differences.

I saw this exact same post right after making my post, but there was another one that also said that Windows / the OS would see the drive AFTER it booted, but they were not able to get it to be usable as a boot drive:

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/605292-will-the-samsung-950-pro-work-with-an-asus-m5a97-r20/

 

[Darkbreeze]

I can't say that one or the other is right, never tried setting up bootable NVME on that specific motherboard, but I can tell you that on older boards this is a topic that is generally hit or miss depending on whether there have been bios updates since NVME drives became more mainstream and also the specific controller used in the drive model.

Generally, on boards that do not have an M.2 slot, trying to set up one as a boot device on a PCI card really depends on the PCI controller card being used but more often than not they will work for storage but not for boot.