Upgrading to M.2 Via A PCI-E Card

[AngelfireUk83]

Hi guys

this is my motherboard https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z68AP-D3-rev-10/sp#sp

I've had this rig for 9 years now maybe 10 and it's still got life in it for what I need only I would like to upgrade my storage speed my Crucial 128gb SSD is actually broken where the SATA cable end that clips into the drive snapped off and the cable is held to the drive via tape and it been working fine, but for peace of mind I would like to replace it but was looking into a M.2 but via a PCI-E card. My quesion is if I buy this card https://www.scan.co.uk/products/aka...sink-cooler-pcie-gen3-x16-slot-low-profile-1u

and this drive https://www.scan.co.uk/products/250...d-2000mb-s-read-1100mb-s-write-150k-180k-iops

And I install it will it then drop my GPU to lower than 16x just that under my spec on the main website it says such a thing but does that refer to another GPU or storage system and GPU???

In time I would like to upgrade all my storage to SSD and get away from the hard drives

UPDATE: Have to scrap that idea because I've been reading that the Z68 chipset won't boot to a M.2 drive even via a PCI-E card

 

[dejo]

You can boot this board from an M.2. You may have to do it with a Clover boot disk. I literally just got rid of a Z68P-DS3 board. If I remember correctly, it would boot directly with my Samsung 950 Pro SSD- havent found other drives that work like that though. I just passed that board on to a friend of my daughters

 

[HankB]

My Z87 motherboard - about the same generation as yours - is happily booting from an NVME drive in a PCI-e adapter. That's not officially supported with that generation of H/W but it works nonetheless. That's w/out a Clover boot disk.

I'm not saying that yours will definitely work, but that you won't know until you try.

I don't know anything about the Clover boot disk and can't comment on that.

 

[dejo]

what M.2 are you using to boot on said board?

 

[trents]

Hank, his board is a Z68, not a Z87.

The Clover boot loader is used by the Hackintosh crowd to simulate Apple computers' motherboard firmware. I don't know if it has other applications.

 

[dejo]

clover does have applications for booting m.2 to motherboards without the protocol. It is also gendered into uefi and non uefi protocol as well. but even works on my old x58 Asus extreme II board

 

[HankB]

Hank, his board is a Z68, not a Z87.

Yes, I saw that. My point was that even if it is not officially supported, it might work.

 

[ezcharlie]

AngelfireUk83, were you able to make it work? i'm in the same boat and am even trying to look for an adapter that would allow me to boot a raid 0 nvme pair.

 

[dejo]

I had this board till recently, and it will indeed boot from a carrier card with an m.2 drive. Booting into a raid, may be another story- but could work