Some NvME advice needed

[Curious Pineapple]

I'm running a Z800 workstation because cheap, and fancy a bit more storage speed. I have an SSD in it already however the SATA controller on board is only SATA 2. I'm thinking of getting a PCIe to m.2 adaptor and using an NvME drive.

 

I've been researching options and it seems that the board (being over 10 years old) doesn't support drives without a built in option BIOS. The 950 Pro should work but I don't want my options to be limited to one rather expensive EOL drive. What should I be looking out for apart from trying to find success stories with various drives? If NvME seems a bit of a stretch I may buy a RAID controller and stripe a pair of WD SSD's as I already have one. A [proper sulition would be nicer though

[Radium_Angel]

11 minutes ago, Curious Pineapple said:

I'm running a Z800 workstation because cheap, and fancy a bit more storage speed. I have an SSD in it already however the SATA controller on board is only SATA 2. I'm thinking of getting a PCIe to m.2 adaptor and using an NvME drive.

 

I've been researching options and it seems that the board (being over 10 years old) doesn't support drives without a built in option BIOS. The 950 Pro should work but I don't want my options to be limited to one rather expensive EOL drive. What should I be looking out for apart from trying to find success stories with various drives? If NvME seems a bit of a stretch I may buy a RAID controller and stripe a pair of WD SSD's as I already have one. A [proper sulition would be nicer though

FWIW, I run an vNME drive on a PCI adapter board in my PowerEdge 2900, which is way more than 10 years old.

No issues, other than the lack of maximum throughput. I will still pull down ~800MB/sec, just not the max advertised speed in the GB/sec.

And my nVME card is some generic no-name card that I strongly doubt has any sort of bells and whistles.

[Timotheus2]

Older UEFI versions and legacy BIOS do not support booting from NVMe, but there are ways around that. Since the Z800 does not have UEFI, you can't mod the BIOS to support NVMe directly. But you can use Clover or DUET to load the NVMe driver before booting the OS. This will result in slightly longer boot times and requires a USB stick plugged in all the time.

[Curious Pineapple]

1 minute ago, Timotheus2 said:

Older UEFI versions and legacy BIOS do not support booting from NVMe, but there are ways around that. Since the Z800 does not have UEFI, you can't mod the BIOS to support NVMe directly. But you can use Clover or DUET to load the NVMe driver before booting the OS. This will result in slightly longer boot times and requires a USB stick plugged in all the time.

Just saw that someone uses a 960 with Clover in a Z820. I think I'll have to either find a supported drive (one so far) or fall back to the RAID card option and buy another 240GB SSD. Farting around to get an OS to boot isn't ideal.

[NunoLava1998]

Why do you want NVMe? Do you need it, or do you just want bragging rights.  

[Curious Pineapple]

2 minutes ago, NunoLava1998 said:

Why do you want NVMe? Do you need it, or do you just want bragging rights.  

Stuck with SATA 2, why the hell would I want bragging rights when the machine is 10+ years old and came out of a skip?

 

I can either buy a RAID controller that will be redundant if I replace the machine at some point, or I can get NVMe and carry that over. Price will be about the same unless I buy the cheapest from China POS RAID controller that may fail in a week,