Asus Z97-C nvme boot support

[Itzik68]

Hi,

 

I have a Z97-C motherboard and it has a M.2 connector that by Asus support page (refer attached image) can support both SATA & PCIE mode.

I want to add an NVME SSD to my system as a boot drive but I keep recalling hearing (can't remember when or where) that native NVME boot support was added with the skylake architecture and Z170 chipset.

So I want to be sure that my motherboard will be able to boot from that SSD and that it will take advantage of the PCIE bandwidth.

 

I googled it but couldn't find any search results regarding this specific board...

 

I appreciate it a lot if someone can confirm to me if it's possible or not.

[FrostBittn]

NVMe uses PCIe lanes, so yes that board supports booting off of NVMe drives. Just to double check, I checked pcpartpicker if there were any Z97 builds that did this and found this one https://pcpartpicker.com/b/LZjypg

[wolfsbane3083]

As far as I'm away Z97 will support NVME but only with the use of a PCI-E adapter card. The on-board M.2 is only PCI-E 2x and is not compatible with NVME.

[FrostBittn]

59 minutes ago, wolfsbane3083 said:

The on-board M.2 is only PCI-E 2x and is not compatible with NVME.

Why would it being PCIe 2x mean it isn't compatible with NVMe? There are 2x NVMe drives, such as this one https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077GZ7449

[wolfsbane3083]

9 hours ago, FrostBittn said:

Why would it being PCIe 2x mean it isn't compatible with NVMe? There are 2x NVMe drives, such as this one https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B077GZ7449

Sorry for the delay, on Z97 the PCI-E slots used by the M.2 controller only supports PCI-E 2.0 X2 and is therefor limited to 1GB/s which is why NVME is only supported by the PCI-E adapters on Z97