On an older system while you can add a PCI card to the system, in a lot of cases you won't be able to boot off of it without motherboard support. You can get around that by keeping a spinning drive or a small ssd or USB crive that actually boots the system and then immediately hands over to the root partition on the NVMe letting you have your cake and eat it too.

While a pure PCIe based card is quite expensive, you can get a PCI card that will give you an M.2 slot for around $13 and up. The nice thing about getting the adapter, other than saving some money, is that most new motherboards are shipping with one or more NVMe m.2 slots, so you will be able to carry your drive over to a new computer when you decide to upgrade.

Brian Cluff

On 05/22/2018 02:50 PM, Stephen Partington wrote:

there are a few ways to get an NVMe drive in your system. M.2 PCIe based drive. you can also buy a PCIe card to mount one as well as a PCIe card that is integrated. There is also a U.2 which was aimed more towards Server architecture.

a x1 slot has a single direction BW of 2.5 Gbps/200MBps and x4 slot can move 1 Gbps/800MBps

so most NVMe based m.2 drives are wired to 2 or 4 lanes. In your case a 4x PCIe slot would be a great deal of performance even over the normal SATA bandwidth.

the PCIe cards do have a fair amount of cost added to them.

On Tue, May 22, 2018 at 2:30 PM, Steve Litt <slitt@troubleshooters.com> wrote:

On Tue, 22 May 2018 13:57:29 -0700
Brian Cluff <brian@snaptek.com> wrote:

> For me, I would get a system that can use a NVMe. They are about the
> same price as an SSD, but make and SSD look extremely slow.

This is the first I've heard of NVMe. I just read
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVM_Express , and now have some questions:

1) Can I replace the spinning platter 2.5" hard disk in my 5 year old
laptop with an NVMe device? My research tells me an NVMe must plug
into a PCIe slot rather than a SATA slot.

2) Do you fstrim NVMe-hosted partitions the same way you do for SSD?

3) When you install an NVMe card in a PCIe slot, what device name shows
up? Is it sd-whatever, or something else?

4) If my desktop has a free PCIe slot, does that mean I can plug in an
NVIe drive and use it?

Thanks,

SteveT

Steve Litt
June 2018 featured book: Twenty Eight Tales of Troubleshooting
http://www.troubleshooters.com/28

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