Z97 and NVMe

[Voodoo Rufus]

Are there any Z97 boards that take NVMe M.2 SSD's without issue? I know it was the early days of the standard for consumer boards, so I'm a little leery on it.

 

[Johan45]

IIRC quite a few boards supported NVMe PCIe not sure if it was x4 but..... You might have to check a manual for a board that you're interested in

 

[Voodoo Rufus]

I've seen a few advertising "10Gbps M.2" but not sure which PCI configuration that comes to.

 

[dejo]

the ones that I had all seemed to be (somewhat) limited to 60mm length. On the asrock Z97m ITXX/AC I actually just taped the end of an 80mm M.2 to the board. I have seen several with the M.2 slot but always was limited to pcie gen3 x2 speeds

 

[Robert17]

I used a PCI mounting card for the m.2 on my Z97. No issues.

 

[Voodoo Rufus]

I have seen enough 80mm slots, but nothing to 110mm. I don't plan on wasting an Optane M.2 in this rig build idea, so a standard 80mm will be just fine.

 

[Oldschool_OC]

I ran an Intel 665p 1TB on my Maximus 7 Hero (Z97) for a couple of months. Max speeds ran just shy of 1 Gigabyte/sec, but the only way to actually see transfers like that was to run a RAID-0 striped drive (2x256 Samsung 850 Pro) in the same rig.
The downside is that to run an NVME in that board it actually disables all of the pci-e x1 slots, leaving the sound card to be run in the pci-e 2.0 slot at the bottom of the board.

I migrated the 665p to my Z97 Extreme6, but this time put it in a pci-e x1 adapter card. It can only transfer at x1 speeds now, but that system no longer has any need for faster transfers anyhow, and it leaves all the other pci-e slots available.

From what I have read if the board you are interested in does not say it has NVME support, it may not even recognize the drive in an adapter card (at the BIOS level). Although I have seen BIOS mod requests for such instances, I don't know if any have worked. I would suggest making sure the board you go for states it has NVME support.