NVME Drives

[MajorMusician]

Hey, sorry to throw a question in here at random. I am running a MSI Gaming 7 with the Z97 chipset, paired to an i5-4960k. Currently I have a 2.5" 280gb SATA 3 SSD as a boot drive and a 750gb 2.5" mechanical drive for Mass storage. I have been having lots of issues with space as you can probably assume and have been trying to decide on a new drive to upgrade my capabilities. I have been torn between a sata 2.5" SSD or a NVME m.2 drive. I was reading that the board might not be able to use the NVME system for PCIe transfer and would instead just revert the drive back to sata3 speeds. Where as other sources say that the board would use PCIe but the age would cause it to use x2 rather than x4, either way an upgrade over SATA 3. I'm asking the community if they believe the board would use PCIe x2 or x4 and actually be bootable with a NVME drive? I posted on a thread with a similar issue; however, it being an old thread I haven't gotten a reply. Or would the age of the chipset not pair up with a NVME drive and give me no better speeds than SATA 3. I will let you know that I do audio and video production and would definitely benefit from the speed of transferring somewhat large files around the system. Thanks a bunch in advance for any information you can lend. Sorry for the lengthy explanation.

[The_russian]

According to MSI's product page the motherboard has a PCIe 2.0 2x interface for m.2, for a bandwidth of 10Gb/s vs Sata 3 bandwidth of 6Gb/s. It will be limited by the 2x interface, but it will still be faster than a sata drive. 

[RadiatingLight]

5 minutes ago, The_russian said:

According to MSI's product page the motherboard has a PCIe 2.0 2x interface for m.2, for a bandwidth of 10Gb/s vs Sata 3 bandwidth of 6Gb/s. It will be limited by the 2x interface, but it will still be faster than a sata drive. 

My understanding is that each lane of PCI-e 3.0 is 1GB/s = 6Gb/s, so the 2x interface would have a max theoretical bandwidth of 2GB/s or 12Gbps

[The_russian]

3 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

My understanding is that each lane of PCI-e 3.0 is 1GB/s = 6Gb/s, so the 2x interface would have a max theoretical bandwidth of 2GB/s or 12Gbps

1GB/s is 8Gb/s not 6, and the PCIe version is 2.0, not 3.0 so the 2x interface should theoretically have a bandwidth of 8Gb/s, but the website says 10Gb/s. 

[MajorMusician]

Thank you guys for that answer so much. Im sorry I just skimmed over the option of literally just looking at the product page. I just found a couple issues on other forums and got confused. I'm guessing now that I will have to deal with the bootability situation when I get the device. I read that there were some issues with needing to update the bios to make it possible to boot from a NVME drive; however, I just recently updated the bios and lost all functionality of my Ethernet Controller. Drivers will not even install because they can't detect the device. So if you have heard anything about that MSI bios issue before, some help would be great. But, I will update the progress as soon as I get the drive in and get the process rolling.