Use NVMe on boards that does not have native support...

[maxtch]

We all know that ever since P67 we can put a NVMe drive onto the motherboard, and the OS will see it as a storage device. However in order to boot from NVMe you generally need a newer motherboard with UEFI-level NVMe support... Or do you? Do you have any solution to boot from NVMe on an older machine?

 

Currently as my best knowledge, the following models of NVMe drives has a built-in BIOS Option ROM, allowing any machine to boot from that NVMe drive if 1) they have a PCIe slot and 2) they allow execution of Option ROM in BIOS CSM.

• Intel SSD 750 series
• Samsung 950 Pro

Those are the first ever NVMe drives of their respective manufacturers, and almost anything subsequent to them lacked that Option ROM.

 

A second way I have used is to hack the BIOS itself. Someone has made a universal Dxe driver for almost any UEFI BIOS based on AMI Aptio, and through adding that driver into the BIOS image and flash it you can get native NVMe support. This is a risky business though as you might brick your board if the hack failed. I have the BIOS on my Z9PE-D16C/2L modified in this way, and my 960 Pro appears to the motherboard UEFI somehow as a PATA device.

 

AFAIK a third way is to use a boot trampoline device, for example a boot partition on the SATA data drive, one of those industrial Disk on Module, a SD to SATA or even a small SATA SSD as a boot trampoline. That boot trampoline device contains either GRUB 2, or Clover bootloader, all of which has NVMe driver as a module. The old BIOS is configured to boot to that trampoline, which in turn chain loads the main OS bootloader (only for Windows, both GRUB 2 and Clover would work) or loads the OS itself (Linux kernel from GRUB 2 trampoline, or Hackintosh from Clover trampoline) from that NVMe drive.

[Jurrunio]

I don't really care if NVMe is used for boot or just storage. SATA and PCIe SSD boot the system about as fast anyway, apps with heavy I/O operations run after the OS is booted and can use PCIe storage freely.

[seagate_surfer]

To a large extent, Jurrunio is summarizing everything, SSDs do not use random readings like hard drives, but use mostly sequential readings. The startup process is sequential and both SATA and NVMe PCIe drives can start an OS only a few milliseconds apart. Where SSDs that are PCIe NVMe type have a great advantage is to transfer heavy files like movies due to the number of lanes and maybe the digital media creators will save a lot of time copying from one place to the other but I wouldn't pay much attention if I only need to move boot files.