Use NVME M.2 Drive as Bootdisc on Intel 6-series Chipset

[spt_the_lucker]

Hello everybody,

recently I watch this video about "The FASTEST SSD Technology Explained - M.2, U.2, and MORE" from Linus Tech Tips.

Since I have an older System with an ASUS P8Z77-V LE PLUS Mainboard and an i7-3770k I wanted to get to know more about M.2 and the compatibility towards older mainboards.

After searching the Internet for some time, I found out that most older mainboards BIOS were not updated to support NVME drives as bootdisc, even if you go the adapter way, those boards will only recognize your M.2 drive as storage device and not as boot device.

 

After this conclusion I really wanted to know if there was any possibility in upgrading my Z77 board to support M.2. via modding the BIOS. 
That was the moment when I found this thread on another platform: http://www.overclock.net/t/1571271/tutorial-how-to-add-nvme-support-on-any-ami-uefi-bios-with-an-intel-chipset which gives you a complete tutorial on "how to mod your BIOS" accordingly to your intel chipset.

 

My question now would be, has anyone ever tested this scenario? Is there any possibility Linus Tech Tips would do a video on this, because I am not that much into BIOS modding & I don`t really want to brick my board because the above mentioned thread is bullocks ? In my opinion this modification and possibility to do such a huge upgrade on your Z77 board would be awesome for many people.

 

Thanks for your help & comments 

 

spT

 

 

 

[WereCat]

@STRMfrmXMN tried it but his BIOS have not allowerd it due to not enough sufficient space for the extra code as far as I remember...

I have not attempted it yet as well as I dont really care about NVME and I will most likely upgrade to a new platform anyway before buying such an SSD.

 

That said, NVME is not really much faster as a boot drive compared to regular SSD as the random 4k writes/reads are not as much higher on most of the affordable NVME drives. 

[BubblyCharizard]

it is possible in Windows (albeit a bit difficult) to have the bootloader on the sata drive, and the actual OS on a different device......just not very easy to implement

 

This would make no need to mod the BIOS

 

unix like Oses make it a bit easier upon install, but still not easy

[spt_the_lucker]

5 minutes ago, WereCat said:

@STRMfrmXMN tried it but his BIOS have not allowerd it due to not enough sufficient space for the extra code as far as I remember...

I have not attempted it yet as well as I dont really care about NVME and I will most likely upgrade to a new platform anyway before buying such an SSD.

 

I already tried modding the BIOS, but haven't been curious enough to flash it on the board until now. But my modded BIOS actually has the same filesize with the nvme modules in it as before.

 

7 minutes ago, WereCat said:

That said, NVME is not really much faster as a boot drive compared to regular SSD as the random 4k writes/reads are not as much higher on most of the affordable NVME drives. 

I dont really understand why NVME should not be faster on boot as a SATA SSD, maybe I'm totally wrong with this, but these are the speeds of my actual SATA SSD:

Samsung 850 EVO  

• Speed:Read: 540 MB/s, Write: 520 MB/s

compared to a Samsung 960 EVO M.2

• Speed: Read: 3200 MB/s, Write: 1500 MB/s

Thanks for your help & your superfast reply!

[DrHax34]

Why don't you install Windows on the NVMe drive but have a normal SATA disc with the grub bootloader installed or the Clover bootloader? (Yes, this last one is for hackintosh, but it does the job) What you need is a bootloader that boots from the SATA drive and then is able to boot the OS on the NVMe drive, should work, I think.

[WereCat]

2 minutes ago, spt_the_lucker said:

I already tried modding the BIOS, but haven't been curious enough to flash it on the board until now. But my modded BIOS actually has the same filesize with the nvme modules in it as before.

 

I dont really understand why NVME should not be faster on boot as a SATA SSD, maybe I'm totally wrong with this, but these are the speeds of my actual SATA SSD:

Samsung 850 EVO  

• Speed:Read: 540 MB/s, Write: 520 MB/s

compared to a Samsung 960 EVO M.2

• Speed: Read: 3200 MB/s, Write: 1500 MB/s

Thanks for your help & your superfast reply!

Because the 540/520 MB/s and 3200/1500 MB/s are sequential speeds. If you write/read single large file.

For OS usage, the random 4k speeds are way more important and those are usually around 30/40 MB/s for SATA SSD and about 50/60 MB/s for most NVME SSDs.

[Droidbot]

1 minute ago, spt_the_lucker said:

I already tried modding the BIOS, but haven't been curious enough to flash it on the board until now. But my modded BIOS actually has the same filesize with the nvme modules in it as before.

 

I dont really understand why NVME should not be faster on boot as a SATA SSD, maybe I'm totally wrong with this, but these are the speeds of my actual SATA SSD:

Samsung 850 EVO  

• Speed:Read: 540 MB/s, Write: 520 MB/s

compared to a Samsung 960 EVO M.2

• Speed: Read: 3200 MB/s, Write: 1500 MB/s

Thanks for your help & your superfast reply!

the sequential writes and reads are much faster, but the 4k writes and reads (what actually matter in the real world when loading large amounts of files in different locations) are not much changed. 

[spt_the_lucker]

12 minutes ago, WereCat said:

Because the 540/520 MB/s and 3200/1500 MB/s are sequential speeds. If you write/read single large file.

For OS usage, the random 4k speeds are way more important ant those are usually around 30/40 MB/s for SATA SSD and about 50/60 MB/s for most NVME SSDs.

ok i see, so in terms of boot, a NVME drive does not make so much of a difference, thank you very much for clearing up this side of the topic @WereCat @Droidbot.  But running your system on an NVME does give you those sequential speeds of which you can profit I guess.

 

14 minutes ago, DrHax34 said:

Why don't you install Windows on the NVMe drive but have a normal SATA disc with the grub bootloader installed or the Clover bootloader? (Yes, this last one is for hackintosh, but it does the job) What you need is a bootloader that boots from the SATA drive and then is able to boot the OS on the NVMe drive, should work, I think.

is installing a bootloader in the end easier than modding the bios with the above mentioned tutorial and doesnt this slow down boot again because it needs to talk to different components? if this tutorial would definitely work, i think there would be a lot less hassle to get an M.2 drive in your system, but i can be wrong. Would be awesome to find someone who tried this before and succeeded in doing so.

Thanks everybody for you help.

[STRMfrmXMN]

7 hours ago, WereCat said:

@STRMfrmXMN tried it but his BIOS have not allowerd it due to not enough sufficient space for the extra code as far as I remember...

I have not attempted it yet as well as I dont really care about NVME and I will most likely upgrade to a new platform anyway before buying such an SSD.

 

That said, NVME is not really much faster as a boot drive compared to regular SSD as the random 4k writes/reads are not as much higher on most of the affordable NVME drives. 

Bro I'm not even sure how you remember that

 

I had a B85M-D3H and yes, there wasn't enough room in the BIOS for microcode for NVMe. If you have a Z87 board they usually will allow it and any Z97 board with an M.2 will support it but won't get full speed from it.

[AshleyAshes]

1 hour ago, STRMfrmXMN said:

Bro I'm not even sure how you remember that

 

I had a B85M-D3H and yes, there wasn't enough room in the BIOS for microcode for NVMe. If you have a Z87 board they usually will allow it and any Z97 board with an M.2 will support it but won't get full speed from it.

I've also read confirmed reports if to working on various X79 boards without trouble, I was researching it for my own X79 board before concluding that an 1GB EVO 850 over traditional SATA3 would be a smarter way to spend my money.

[WereCat]

1 hour ago, STRMfrmXMN said:

Bro I'm not even sure how you remember that

 

I had a B85M-D3H and yes, there wasn't enough room in the BIOS for microcode for NVMe. If you have a Z87 board they usually will allow it and any Z97 board with an M.2 will support it but won't get full speed from it.

I have a perfect memory for things which I don't need to know

[DrHax34]

15 hours ago, spt_the_lucker said:

ok i see, so in terms of boot, a NVME drive does not make so much of a difference, thank you very much for clearing up this side of the topic @WereCat @Droidbot.  But running your system on an NVME does give you those sequential speeds of which you can profit I guess.

 

is installing a bootloader in the end easier than modding the bios with the above mentioned tutorial and doesnt this slow down boot again because it needs to talk to different components? if this tutorial would definitely work, i think there would be a lot less hassle to get an M.2 drive in your system, but i can be wrong. Would be awesome to find someone who tried this before and succeeded in doing so.

Thanks everybody for you help.

It comes down to this. Do you want a faster boot OR do you want a faster OS experience? Boot may be the same as a normal SSD but OS experience would improve.

[spt_the_lucker]

On 12/5/2017 at 5:46 PM, STRMfrmXMN said:

I had a B85M-D3H and yes, there wasn't enough room in the BIOS for microcode for NVMe. If you have a Z87 board they usually will allow it and any Z97 board with an M.2 will support it but won't get full speed from it.

i have an ASUS P8Z77-V LE PLUS  board actually. if I follow the tutorial mentioned in the first post, i can extract nvme modules from any ASUS z97  boards to implement them in the original ASUS Z77 BIOS from the manufacturer to make nvme compatible as boot drive, since Asus is not updating those BIOSes anymore. 

 

16 hours ago, DrHax34 said:

It comes down to this. Do you want a faster boot OR do you want a faster OS experience? Boot may be the same as a normal SSD but OS experience would improve.

Boot is not really the matter because I can't complain about a the boottime at all, but overall OS experience could surely need a boost, that's why I actually started researching on this topic and wanted to know how I can upgrade my system furthermore without going the "get a new rig,spend too much money & be happy" way!  

If anyone with a Z77 board would be curious enough to try this or maybe has done this before I would appreciate some more feedback.

 

thanks again for your nice help!

[DrHax34]

5 hours ago, spt_the_lucker said:

Boot is not really the matter because I can't complain about a the boottime at all, but overall OS experience could surely need a boost, that's why I actually started researching on this topic and wanted to know how I can upgrade my system furthermore without going the "get a new rig,spend too much money & be happy" way!  

If anyone with a Z77 board would be curious enough to try this or maybe has done this before I would appreciate some more feedback.

 

thanks again for your nice help!

Dude, this does not break or brick your PC, you can do it yourself, it's simple. You can even try installing a linux distro first, and installing windows after, maybe grub boots NVMe, I don't know! You just need to have a SATA drive that contains the bootloader!

[DrHax34]

This is something I haven't tested, but look: http://mrlithium.blogspot.pt/2015/12/how-to-boot-nvme-ssd-from-legacy-bios.html