Some people pointed out I made a mistake in this video: the board in my test pc only has PCIe 2.0 ports, not 3.0. To be honest this makes the speed difference with the SATA drive only more interesting. If you have a system with true PCIe 3.0 ports you will likely get higher numbers than I did.
Well, my "old computer" still running as a print server and VPN server under Win2K Pro only has ISA slots. But it's been running 24/7 for 23 years, so I guess I'll keep it the way it is.
These adapters are cool if you want to upgrade your machine, but as you said, older PCs that would benefit the most from such an upgrade don't play all that well with it lol
Well I would argue that a 3x faster read and write speeds compared to a SATA ssd are pretty neat, but indeed you do need something else in order to boot from it.
@@ex-itguyThere is a tool that creates a bootable USB drive which can load drivers missing in the BIOS. I boot several older PCs and servers with it to further boot from NVMe.
You actually can boot from an NVMe drive even your motherboard doesn't explicitly support it, as long as it supports UEFI (and your OS supports UEFI boot). Every single NVMe drive comes with an OpROM, which is basically a "UEFI driver" that tells the UEFI how to boot from it. Also, there is one NVMe drive that is known to have a legacy OpROM, which allows you to boot from an OS installed in legacy BIOS boot mode (the motherboard still needs to support UEFI): the Samsung Pro 950.
Interesting, someone else mentioned something similar. My Phenom II system does support UEFI but I haven't gotten it to boot from the NVMe yet. Something to dig deeper into for sure!
I didn't get it to boot with an older board (which supports UEFI). I tried every disk/CSM/legacy setting combination, but it didn't work. But what works is to boot from a SD card with rEFInd installed and that boots the system on the NVMe SSD. I don't mind to use a SD card. Before adding the card I booted the complete OS from SD card, because all SATA ports are taken by the HDDs (it's a NAS). But having an OS on a SD card is not stable. Now it is stable. ;)
@@Schwinni you would need to mod your bios to add nvme drivers If you refer to Clover, you have your OS on hard drive. With SD/usb you just boot from legacy to a UEFI bootloader that accepts booting of your hard drive OS
I've used Clover on a USB stick and booted via NVMe on a non uefi first gen i7 for quite a few years. Was a little cumbersome to set up but worked very reliably afterward.
I got one for my OptiPlex, and after adding the relevant DXE driver to the UEFI, it could boot from the NVMe drive. Though it's PCIe 2.0, it's still considerably faster than any SATA SSD.
DXE driver? I am wanting to try this in my Precision 390, I tried an M.2 PCIe card adapter ten years ago, in it and in a then-new MSI AMD motherboard that had an erroneous product description as having an M.2 2280 slot on the motherboard, but neither would see the Samsung drive I had bought to pair with the MSI.
Thats interesting to know. My old B450... well it rocks (badly) under pressure!!!! If you have any updates, please let us know..... I have an old MSI B450 Max II.... pretty sure its seen its best years. But if anyone can advise how to make her dance again? To save time - MRS Gaming 850w Power, MSI Tomahawk Max Pro II Motherboard, 4x 8GB DDR4 (yes, only 3000hz), 2TB Nvme boot drive (about 100TB external) 4GB Nvidia 1050Ti.
@@si4632 Agreed. For what I do - mostly data transfer and fairly basic gaming.... its fine. I have a few things to get done this year, but then I'll go for a "proper" gaming system again. But for now, I'm happy with my little all-rounder.
I thought about including that but I thought the video was long enough as it is 😆 I need to figure out how that works with Windows. Linux isn't that hard: just make sure /boot is on a drive the bios can boot from.
@@ex-itguy In my case I have a 4th gen Haswell system with no m.2 slot and for using these adapters to boot from NVME I got to use some workaround since the bios doesn't support this !
There is a way to do it with Clover + mVME driver module. Doesn't take up too much space so a tiny sata SSD, SD-card or USB stick already works for the bootloader.
If you want to boot from your newly installed nVME SSD.. Bottom line is that these mostly work out-of-the-box with a 6th gen /DDR4 system or newer! For older systems you'll need Clover, a bootloader with nVME driver support on a supported bootable medium such as SD card, USB, old sata SSD. Cool stuff. Maybe you can include that in a follow-up video? Cheers, A Current-IT guy
Even if the motherboard does not support NVMe drives, you can obtain support for boot from an NVMe drive by installing the Clover software to a USB and setting the motherboard BIOS to boot from the USB drive. I did this with 15 year old Asus Sabretooth motherboard, an AMD Fx6100 processor and an Fanxiana NVMe. It achieves access speeds to the NVMe of 1.5 GBps. I also believe, I can increase this speed because Sisift Sandra tells me that the motheboard supports PCI 2.0, 4 x lane rated at 5GBps and the Fanxiana NVMe is a Gen 3 (1 GBps to 16 GBps) and SiSoft Sandra states that the device is running in low power mode and that better performance can be achieved if the NVMe is switched to high power mode. I have yet to find out how to do this,
I have read about it but have yet to play with it. About the speed: I made a mistake and tested on 2.0. Should be a lot faster on 3.0. I'll try to redo the test next week on other hardware.
Thanks! It seems to be a pretty well known case so I thought it would make a good thumb. I'm actually planning to move the hardware from my Phenom 2 machine in there though since it is quite a good case. :)
Great video, thank you so much for taking the time! I have a six-year-old system and I was wondering if it would make sense to buy an adapter for NVMe. For my system, it wouldn't make sense. You've just saved me the money and hustle. Subscribed!
Note that there is an error in this video, which I addressed in the follow-up video. All readings were PCIe 2.0, on 3.0 the speeds doubled. So if your 6yo system has at least a PCIe x4 slot available that's not shared with the GPU things might be different for you. :)
I use a similar one on my main rig, just because one M.2 slot on my motherboard (Crosshair VII Hero) shares bandwith with the main x16 slot, and as this is a PCIe 3.0 platform, I want to give all the possible bandwith to my RTX 3080. The drive is in PCIe 2.0 slot but still more than fast enough for game storage.
If you are lucky you may find a modded bios with NVME support for your motherboard. I upgraded an old Haswell machine with a nvme m.2 ssd and a cheap pcie adapter and it really gives new life to this machine.
I actually use one in my PC build from last year. It had two nvme slots which infilled with 2 TB nvmes, than later got a good deal on a 1 TB drive so added it in with one of these.
Older mainboards will probably need a UEFI patch or workaround to be able to "see" the drive. That's what I did with my Asus M5A97 r2 board. Worked like a charm. Experienced users at Win-RAID Forum can help you with this.
I used a 1x card on a J4125 ITX board to save the sata for nas storage (SATA high capacity drives were much cheaper at least at the time of build). CrystalDiskMark showed just over 900MB/s with a cheap Samsung OEM PCIe 3.0 NVMe that managed about 2,200MB/s on a true NVMe port. Was good enough for me. Since upgraded server/Nas to a T500 on a 4x4 NVMe slot board that goes to about 7,300MB/s
Man I love this channel reminds of myself a little!! In my desktop I bought an Intel Optane SSD 900 and it is very fast even running at 3.0. I put one of those NVMe adapter cards in my son's computer and it made a difference at least it seems so. Thanks for the video and you have a new sub!
This kind of adapters work really well: I'm using two of them. One is PCIe 1X (so slow), but the other is a 4X job - quite snappy. And I bought these weird chinese ones, no boutique brand.
Super intresting! I bought 2 PCIe 1x cards off ali express to try this too, only to find out that even m.2 gen 3's have hardly come down in price since gen 5 hit the market
I upgraded a core2 e8400 with a cheap nvme adapter. Of course, a ssd sata is needed for bios boot. The adapter I use is pci-e 1x. I achieve the same speed with sata ssd than with 1-channel nvme, although the latency is somewhat lower... And I use Debian Linux which is far more flexible than m$ obeseware for installation
Yeah that's an issue on a lot of systems. The Core2quad machine I had (actually the one in the thumb lol) doesn't have a second X16 slot either. A company is contacted me about an external NVMe enclosure they wanted to send me. Would be interesting to see if that might be faster than the X1 card.
I also found out the same as you. I recently built a cheap gaming PC using a spare Dell Optiplex SFF i7. I had some space Nvme drives and so was hoping to use at least one. Well, none of the cards seem to have a low profile bracket, so the card is just sitting loosely in the slot. So not great. And as you noted, no bootloader on the cards so i cannot boot from it. So i have windows 11 on a Sata SSD, and saving game installs to the nvme. Its still nice a fast to be fair.
Interesting, both the X4 cards I tested came with a low profile bracket. There's a bootloader that should work with Windows as well, but I have to look into that myself as well. Linux is a lot easier in that aspect: just put the /boot partition on another drive.
My 11 year old ASUS H97 Plus has an M.2 slot but it couldn't find a 1TB M.2 NVME even when it shows the NVME settings after it was inserted. I bought a Ugreen adapter, attached the 1TB M.2 and put it in the secondary x16 (PCIe 2.0, x4) and with my OS cloned to it, it boots fine. It still doesn't show in the BIOS where it's located, but the BIOS knows it's there and puts it in the boot menu. Forgot to say, that M.2 uses legacy boot as that's how my OS installed originally. The BIOS can boot either legacy or UEFI.
I have some of them, they make a lot of sense: 1. I have a cheap board without nvme slot, Asrock H510 2. I have a server and need all 6 sata onboard slots, the nvme slot blocks 2 sata when in use, the pcie slot doesnt 3. I use 2 nvme ssds on a board with only one nvme slot The cheap chinese work as well as the branded ones. I am super satisfied with all of them😂👍 Btw: I assume you need a bios supporting the nvme ssd. Didnt work for me on a Haswell board (Intel 4th gen, H81)
These cards are a godsend if you have old servers still sporting SAS-SATA drives, the latency and amount of IOPS is unbeatable. For any regular desktop use on older system I don't think you will see that much improvements in real-world light workloads compared to SATA 600 SSD's.
I'd say that probably most modern motherboards probably DO support booting from one of those adapters. I have a Z97 motherboard with a 4th generation Intel processor, that didn't have an M.2 slot, but one of those adapters worked just fine. One thing to be aware of, is that one of those adapters could potentially change how many lanes are allocated to your graphics card.
Someone else mentioned that as well, but another said he used one because _the M.2 slot_ shared lanes with the GPU. Annoying stuff. A lot of GPU's don't use all lanes though.
@@ex-itguy It depends on the motherboard and the chipset. Some motherboards get the M.2 lanes from the chipset. Others will get them from the processor. If there are multiple M.2 slots, it will sometimes be a combination. I don't know how they work, post Ryzen era, but previously, most boards would run the x16 slot at x8, when any of the other PCIE slots had anything in them. Some would then drop to x4, if you had something in the alternate full size slot, and something in any of the other slots. In other words. having a drive in an M.2 slot doesn't necessarily affect performance, but having an adapter card in one of the PCIE slots almost definitely could. However, it's also true that at least as of the RTX 20 series, most cards didn't even come close to maxing out the x16 bandwidth. It might be different with the xx90 series. I don't know. Just be aware that there is potential to affect your system with PCIE accessories installed.
I had to BIOS mod my X79 by slipstreaming NVMe drivers into it; 3rd-4th Gen Intel was the cusp for it. Overall it depends on how the motherboard was built and the chipset it has. For example a motherboard like Intel H670 would funnel 20ish PCIe lanes over 8x 4.0 lanes, while something like H610 or AMD X870 would funnel fewer lanes over 4x 4.0 lanes.
Thank you for this video. I was planning on adding a NVMe to my older PC, using a Plug-in PCIe M.2 adapter, but have now change my mind, as it's not going to be much faster than the 1TB Samsung 870 EVO SSD I already have in my PC. Russ. UK
These adapters are handy not for just old PCs, but I guess motherboards that only have two M.2 slots. My current machine with a B550-F motherboard only has two (one of them PCI-e 4.0 x4, one of then PCI-e 3.0 x4), which only leaves me with some PCI-e 3.0 x1 slots. I'm the kind of person that adds storage--hate the idea of just tossing drives aside. So my current build had a P5 Plus 1TB, and P3 Plus 1TB, before I upgraded to a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB. Guess what I did with the P3 Plus...ironically went with the same Glotrends adapter, over a year ago. The adapter has held up fine.
Would of been interesting to have tried the adapters with 2 different drives so as to see if the drives themselves may effect the results....As in the slowest adapter may work better with a different brand drive...and the faster worked slower with a different brand..as the controller on various drives may work differently with different adapters..Just a thought.
Indeed, it's severely limited by the amount of lanes. By the way I speed tested my 2015 Macbook, which also has a pcie 3.0 nvme (just with a proprietary connector...) and it also got to 1.7GB/s like this drive did in the mini pc. So I guess that's the limit of a PCIe 3.0 connection.
Its also useful to update firmwares on nvme's kept in usb enclosures without having to resort to digging into your main rig as firmwares can't be updated over usb.
A Samsung 950 pro can be used on anything with a pcie slot. It installs its own "generic nvme drivers" into the mother board. So anything with even a pciex1 lane can use them for boot drives. A trick you can do, and I did, on a X58 system from 2008. A 950 pro in the top x1 slot. And a 980 pro as the boot drive. I was limited to I believe pcie gen2 speeds. But it was still 1600 read and write speeds. There is a Intel nvme drive that does the same thing. But it can be hard to find and expensive as heck. At least when I was looking for it.
Yeah the speeds in this video are all PCIe 2.0. I made a dumb mistake... I'm planning on picking up a board with an i5 and a PCIe 3.0 board on Monday so I can redo this test on an actual 3.0 slot. Should be quite a bit higher.
@ex-itguy that's absolutely fine. My pcie gen 2 got 1600ish speeds with those drives. I have had 6 of them systems I've built over the years. They work great. That X58 system is still my lan party unit. Got it paired with a RX 6950 XT. It's a thing of beauty.
Of course the PCIe one work but on some old computers you can't boot from them. Those are the computers made before NVME drives started showing up in all new computers. You can use them in those computers but you might not be able to boot from them because of BIOS support for that. They work as storage just fine if you can find the driver (assuming it is not already installed. They can be used in USB or Thunderbolt enclosures too. Use Thunderbolt if you can for the best speed.
a lot of motherboards limit the amount of lanes to extra pci slots, so it's highly probable that you were using 2 lanes instead of 4, that match the theoretical speed of 2Gbs in gen 3. try to use the crystal disk info, cpuz or Aida to confirm that. good work!
There's no difference on my board. I tried but it's the same (didn't think that was very interesting to show). Since the m.2 slot in our mini pc provided about the same performance I think this is actually what you can expect on PCIe 3.0. :)
The only thing I'd say you might wanna look into - the heatsink vs. speed logic is backwards. The drive runs well below its rating, and the conclusions is it doesnt need a HS because its so slow? I think maybe it is running slow because it doesnt have a heatsink, having experienced this with my drives a few times. It doesnt take any time for them to get hot when moving 1GB+/s, and they throttle when that happens. I have a Samsung rated for 7400 that will only ever do 2250 without a heatsink, several SPCCs that run 1/2 their rated speed without a heatsink, etc and so on. All of them perk rioght up and hit near or above rated speed with a heatsink, and I even put little fans on em. THey are adorable TBH.
The drive ran slow because I made a mistake: I tested on PCIe 2.0 (see also pinned comment). I will redo this test soon. Might even try the heatsink then. ;)
Awesome! An updated video comes later today, because I made a mistake on this one. My test machine only had PCIe 2.0 slots. I just redid the tests on a board with a 3.0 slot. Short answer: twice as fast. ;)
I ran linux at nvme speeds on a pre UEFI based bios computer by using sata ssd only for the boot grub and boot partition which passed from there to an nvme with remainder of linux directories.
Unless I missed it, you didn't do any testing on a system with PCIe v2.0. I would expect that the results would be twice the speed of PCIe v1.0 and half the speed of PCIe 3.0. I'm planning on finally upgrading my ASUS M5A97 R2.0 which has PCIe v2.0 (500MB/s per lane x16=8.00GB/s), 32GB of core & a 64-bit AMD FX™-4100 CPU. Its video card is actually designed for PCIe v3.0, so at least it can still be of use. I figured I would put all the Windows/Linux/UNIX page file / swap space on one NVMe and the Boot drive on another NVMe. That way the SATA/USB bottleneck would only be on non-O/S data which doesn't update as much as the O/S data does. I figure this old Mb would be a nice file server with a Rπ⑤ as the printer/scanner server as my Laser printers are RJ45 but my other printers are USB 2.0
You didn't see the pinned comment did you? ;) Yes, I made a mistake. I tested on PCIe 2.0. Even the mini pc that does have PCIe 3.0 seems to use only 2 lanes on the M.2 slot, effectively slowing it down to 2.0 speeds. I don't feel this mistake is bad enough to take the video down but I will create a follow up soon.
@@ex-itguyyeah watched the video and then went straight to writing my comment. I have a couple of new in the box, old 128-256GB NVMe drives lying around so I bought a couple of those 1x & 4× Slot adapters. I'm hoping that even at PCIe 2.0 speeds, an NVMe drive should be as fast if not faster that SATA 3.0 if I only put the Page File on one NVMe and only the O/S on the other. It's not as if they would be slower than SATA 3.0
One correction, your board can still support pcie NVME drive even if the board doesn't have m.2 drive slot. Varies from brand to brand I have MSI and asus and both boards detect and boot from pcie nvne drives.
final thoughts section.. needs NVME bios mod w UBU Uefi bios updater for it to boot.. NVME is direct pcie so no boot rom on the adapter as its part of the ssd
Interesting, didn't know these existed. I run my Core2Quad on an SSD without issue. The two 2.0 and one 1.0 PCI-E slots are taken up by three 9800 GTX+ cards.
In that case this won't help you haha, as mentioned in the pinned comment I made a mistake. The tests were done on PCIe 2.0. Do yours should be able to reach the same speeds if you were to clear up a PCIe 2.0 slot.
such an adapter, because my computer has one M.2 connector. I bought a small disk quite a while ago, and now the prices have dropped. It's a shame to throw it away. Now I can continue using it for a small price.
I use a Magewell DVI plus I bought used for €60. Plus a VGA to DVI adapter I bought on Amazon for a few bucks, because it didn't come with the used Magewell. Works pretty well on VGA. Even DOS resolutions do pretty well on this thing. :) Edit: no wait the VGA to DVI adapter I already had in my box of cables. Didn't buy that one.
It's Gnome Disks, which is the reason I booted a Gnome-centred distro for these tests. :) There's a mistake in this video: my test pc only has PCIe 2.0 slots. I have been testing speed on a board with an actual 3.0 slots today and can already tell you speeds are twice as high on a 3.0 slot. :)
The case you have in the thumbnail.. I have the exact same case (it's from 2004 or something)... Now it's my NAS. I do love the case though, I got mine with sound deadening and it's really really heavy... Also an ex-IT guy btw :-) worked for about 20 years, then I wanted to try something completely different...
Cool! Same here by the way, I have worked in IT for about 24 years and was done with it. Started as a freelance singer and voiceover and actually made this channel as a way to promote my voiceover work... but it's getting a bit out of hand 😂
You could have added a short manual how to boot from a different boot device if your BIOS doesn't support NVME. To shortly summarize, just put the bootloader (lilo, grub or syslinux) and /boot on a bootable device. That way I was able to make an old P4@3Ghz work with a SATA-6G (I literally put in an old 850MByte PATA HD just for booting and shut it down using hdparm after booting) and a Core2 from an M.2 card (I boot from a 2GByte USB-Stick). Booting from Network using PXE/BootP often works surprisingly well too, even my oldest 486 and SGI systems can boot that way, but my servers changed to often so I stop doing that.
That doesn't work for things like Windows or Haiku though, that's why I didn't include it yet. I have to test it on something other than Linux for people running Windows first.
@@ex-itguy syslinux might be the way to go. You can boot it from pretty much anything from MBR, GPT, PXE or some ARM-specific Low-Level-Devices and whatever and it can load and execute RAM-Disks and a lot of other boot-loaders, including the Windows-Bootloader sitting in the EFI-Boot-Partition. Though you usually compile a fitting syslinux-Loader yourself, the ones supplies with distributions (internally UEFI/GPT Linux mostly uses syslinux while MBR Linux still prefers grub) are usually optimized for the mundane task of loading its own Linux-Kernel from a Standard-Mass-Storage-Device.
@@ex-itguy Ignore my last suggestion, there is even a more easy way: Install a dummy Windows on an USB stick (you can downstrip it to bare minimum), then add an Entry in the Boot-Loader of Windows for the M.2 Stick. The Kernel usually is part of the Windows-Boot-Partiiton and with it comes M.2 drivers. i didn't use that explicitly to use an M.2 stick but was successful in using it to run Windows from a non-bootable RAID-card.
Interesting tests. I have a Dell 9020MT mobo rebuilt into an Antec 300 case and am using a NVME adapter on it too. This setup was a gen 4 system though so no boot support for NVME stuff even when connected via adapter card. But I lucked out and someone made a modified UEFI rom I could reflash the mobo with and now it has UEFI boot support for my NVME SSD connected via adapter. I checked and yeah got the 4x PCI card. I'm not sure if I'm getting 3.0 speeds though. I think this mobo has a 3.0 slot but it's only the blue slot which my graphics card occupies. The SSD adapter is plugged into the second 16x slot. Also note with a mobo this old having a 4x NVME connected ends up taking 4 lanes away from the graphics card because the CPU only has 16 lanes available...at least that's how I recall it working with gen 4 Intel boards. So you'll maybe lose a bit of graphics performance...though in most cases on systems this old you'll end up CPU bottlenecked before you can max out graphics card bandwidth I imagine so not something I'm concerned about. I only have a 970Ti in the main slot anyways. :P
Does that GPU use all 16 lanes though? A lot of them don't. Note that I made a mistake by testing on a machine with PCIe 2.0 slots, so I guess speeds should be similar for you?
Hows the Boot Speed on Windows 10 with m2 NVME PCle on old PCs that doenst have a slot? Im very Curious vs Sata SSD if there any difference between the transfer, loading and other things.
A PC must have a BIOS that can boot from the PCIe slots. Those cards have no BIOS add on. They are great for speeding up application load times. Check the bios of your mobo to see if there is a PCIe option for booting.
How about using a Bifurcated pcie controller and get in some cases 3000mbs?...or more if you use a RAID configuration. I've seen some pretty low price on alliexpress. I'm currently using one dual NVMe I bought on amazon for $150. I'me seeing almost double per NVME. Bifurcated cards have a chipset on the card that allows you for use all the PCIe lanes.
An m.2 slot only uses 4 lanes. The X4 cards are perfectly fine. X16 cards are nice if you'd like to put four of them on a card. Total overkill in this setup.
Interesting. What program/OS did you run the benchmarks on? Would have been nice to summarize the speeds in a chart for easy comparison as well. Glad you mentioned that you can't boot from them unless they have a boot rom. I wonder how the best way to "boot" the system so the minimum reading is done from "regular" drive (or very small SSD on SATA connection). That is, start boot from the SSD, and then use the files on the NVME to finish the booting.
If you're running Linux you can just place your boot partition(s) on another drive (can even be a flash drive). For Windows you will need a bootloader that can read from the nvme. Clover seems promising but I haven't gotten around to testing that solution. I used Gnome Disks for this very unscientific test 😄 Note that there's a mistake in this video, which I addressed in the next one. The speeds in my test system were PCIe 2.0. On a board with a 3.0 slot speeds doubled.
I did this on a 4th gen intel mb years ago and got it to boot natively by adding a driver to the uefi bios. It wasn't that difficult to do but a little nerve wracking to not brick the mb (it was still my main pc back then). If the mb is too old to have uefi this will not work.
you know what would be nice? one nvme on the m.2 port of a more modern mobo, and another nvme on one of those adapter cards, then running both in RAID 0 to see what speeds you can achieve
I have one of these cheap nvme to pcie boards in my x79 build. I get great speeds using PCIe 3.0; around 3300MB/s read and write. Also full Nvme boot support with a modded bios.
Yes, I made a mistake and tested on 2.0. Will redo this test hopefully next week. I'm interested to see if there are bigger differences between the cards.
Cool, good way to add a nvme drive. Personally using mint I can not tell the difference between a 7200 rpm HDD and a pcie 3 nvme SSD though. SSD with laptops are great for durability and power efficiency that is the biggest advantage that they have. Great video!
@@ex-itguy Yeah I use both but to me it does not make a massive difference on linux. It is faster but I just don't find it to be absolutely necessary. SSDs are still nice though especially for laptops.
I have managed boot NVMe via USB DOM with CloverEFI and DUET (BIOS to UEFI/GPT) installed, sadly DUET can't support AMD and it just stuck at "Welcome to EFI World"
Bios has to support it mostly NvMe boot support was commonly on 8 th genertion modes.Macpro was an exemption 4,1 & 5,1 with firmware 14.0.0.0 works amazing (LGA1366) cannot compare with other intel motherboards test 70 Plus MacPro Models.
Adapters make little to no difference as long as they are PCIe x4, I have a no name PCIe x4 adapter. Kingston KC3000 gen4 NVMe in second slot of my MB which is also gen4 bu x8 and it works at exact peed as other KC3000 in first M.2 slot. Those single M.2 adapters are very simple as they are nothing more than just small size physical connection to PCIe slot. As NVMe drive prices are same as for for 2.5" SATA SSDs, it's not only at least double the speed but also require no cables and are much smaller. They also make good transportable drives once fitted in a USB housing adapter.
There was a slight difference between the two X4 cards though. No idea why, I expected them to be the same. I need to make an updated video because I made a dumb mistake: my system only has PCIe 2.0 slots.
@@ex-itguy As far as I have seen it, difference is at level of statistical error, you'd have to run benchmark 10 times and find some middle value. Not even worth mentioning. SSDs operation also depends also on state of cells readiness tor writing and weather garbage collection did it's job and turned cells with deleted files back to 0 because just deleting data still keeps cells in same condition.
using nvme adapter on old z87 motherboard and install windows in it with some tweaks requiring you to always plug in the usb drive or it wont't boot to windows, but somehow don't know what i am doing exactly now my pc can boot without usb drive.
Old PCs that could benefit most from this have PCI slots, not PCI Express slots. Wprking on a retro PC right now that still uses IDE connections. It can use SATA. It has some PCI slots but nothing newer.
That are _very_ old pc's haha, even the P4 I have here that's two decades old has a PCIe slot. ;) I was thinking about buying a 44 pin laptop IDE to NVMe adapter case though, see if I can address these 500GB on my P3 laptop haha
Note that I did make a mistake: my system only has PCIe 2.0 slots. So the speeds you see in this video should be a lot higher on 3.0. I'm seeking out a board that has 3.0 slots for a rebound video.
@@ex-itguy I have spent some time for this, seeking an affordable MB with bifurcation, and enough PCIe 3.0 and or 4.0. If you have a bigger budget than me, then workstations motherboards should comply your needs.
I wish I had a big budget haha Luckily my videos get more views lately so I'm finally getting back a bit of what I'm investing in hardware for this channel. ;)
So is the nvme running at pcie 2.0 still faster than a sata ssd? I'd like to try that on an intel ivy bridge, but it only offers 16 3.0 lanes, so the gpu uses all of it, leaving only pcie 2.0 x 4 from the chipset.
TY for shearing. I'm in the predicament with one nvm slot and don't know if I will get better performance as I run 7 instances of diablo 2 resurrected and the loading is slow. So I was thinking of moving 2 to a drive each !?
first everywhere i look it says pcie x 1 is faster than sata Data transfer PCIe is faster than SATA because it uses multiple lanes to transmit data. PCIe uses four lanes, while SATA only uses one second can i install the pcie x1 adapter without the pc bracket ?
There's a mistake in this video, my system only had PCIe 2.0 slots. That's why I did a follow up to retest. On 2.0 an X1 is slower than SATA. On 3.0 it's slightly faster, but not much.
@@ex-itguy yeh confusing for me . mywife bought a pc for her grandson and small shop without telling me and was sold a piece of crap . it has an asus prime a320m micro motherboard with 1 m2 slot with a 256gb card which is a crap mb and is now full . it only has a 2 x PCIe 2.0 i need to get more storage but cannot afford to lose the shops delivery software or i would just buy a bigger m2 and reinstall windows
@@stevethom407 you could use an X1 card just to copy the contents of the internal drive to a new, bigger one? Or a usb enclosure so you can use the old one as a glorified usb stick. ;-) Something like clonezilla can help you with cloning the drive. RescueZilla and Redo Rescue I haven't tried yet but these look even easier to use.
@@ex-itguy yes thanks what i am thinking of doing is getting a 1tb nvme m2 putting it into the pciex1slot then migrate or clone the mb m2 then swop them around but i am not sure if the new m2 will boot ok .. as it uses shop software i cannot lose anything
@@stevethom407 If you use any of the cloning tools I mentioned, you should be fine. I can't imagine the drive itself is anything special so if you copy the whole drive (including partition info) everything should work.
@ex-itguy how to do hardware test. Just bought it 2 months back, no physical damage. Reading speed is working as usual, takes 25 seconds to transfer 48 gb but to write/copy takes 4 min
Not sure, I guess you could just use smartctl to query the drive's status. Not much more you can do without another M.2 slot to check the NVMe drive in, or another NVMe to test the adapter card with.
I found a few which I had shown on screen, like this one: amzn.to/409pVdL However, that one takes a b-key M.2 card, which are already SATA ssds so I guess there's no conversion going on. There's also cards like this one: amzn.to/3DBrZCQ That takes both a b- and an m-key ssd. I believe you need to have a b-key sata drive in the b-key slot in order for an m-key to work. But I haven't tried those myself.
@@ex-itguy The first one is a b-key, so can't use an nvme there. In the second one, you can put one SATA M.2 and connect it using the SATA port. The second slot, the NVME slot, is used only through the SFF-8654 port, which connects to a PCI-E adapter. So yea, we can say there's no nvme to sata adapter.
@@ex-itguy i mean you bought 3 adapters but they all run at the same speed, say 1600 mbps on their spec. sheet and you put them all in the same slot, what's the point of speed testing here?
The point is trying out if there's a difference. As you could see the X1 card was about 4x slower than the X4 cards (which was to be expected, but I wanted to test that). Also, the cheapest X4 card performed just a tiny bit less than the first one so there sure is a difference. I made a dumb mistake though: my machine doesn't have 3.0 slots at all, so these tests were done on 2.0 speeds. I hope to be able to make a follow up next week on actual 3.0 speeds. See if the differences are different from this test.
@@ex-itguy that's a lot of work testing again with 3.0. my point is you can just look at the spec. of all x4 adapters where you bought them. i think their speed are the same not a tiny bit less. the only time the speed is half less than each adapter i tested is when the nvme is on usb adapter not internal adapter directly attached to the board, 1000 mbps and 500 mbps (the websites i bought from stated the spec. of the speed) but if it's internal, speed are the same.
This computer can't have full 3.0 speeds. It looks like it is an older board that only has 2.0 speeds. And, I sure wish you'd cover how to have a bootloader on a USB or a SSD. Because I have an older motherboard that I would love to boot from a USB, and then run stuff off the NVMe. But, back then, I could never figure out how to do it.
You are right, I already mentioned it in the pinned comment and description. This test was done on 2.0. I'm planning to redo the test on another board I'm picking up next week.
It's not all that hard to modify the UEFI BIOS so you can boot from the NVMe, there are good tutorials. Just take care that you save the original BIOS somewhere safe, and handy in case it goes wrong. But to the motherboard, it's just the original BIOS.
I happen to have that exact same athlon 64 computer! lol I just use an old 128gb SATA drive with board max RAM. Works ok with linux on it. Not worth a NvME drive as the cpu would bottleneck the transfer rate.
B is Byte, b is bit. And 4 Gbit/s doesn't even come close to these readings. But I did make a mistake, I tested on PCIe 2.0. A video with new tests will hopefully be ready by the end of today.
Some people pointed out I made a mistake in this video: the board in my test pc only has PCIe 2.0 ports, not 3.0.
To be honest this makes the speed difference with the SATA drive only more interesting. If you have a system with true PCIe 3.0 ports you will likely get higher numbers than I did.
0:25 This is NOT how you handle an M.2 drive, you're literally bending it against the adapter board
@kingeling you're not wrong, but I wasn't pushing. ;)
@@kingeling that is why he is an ex-IT guy.
Well, my "old computer" still running as a print server and VPN server under Win2K Pro only has ISA slots. But it's been running 24/7 for 23 years, so I guess I'll keep it the way it is.
I have plenty of cheap NVMEs lying around bought from Aliexpress. These adapters are lifesaving for old PCs.
These adapters are cool if you want to upgrade your machine, but as you said, older PCs that would benefit the most from such an upgrade don't play all that well with it lol
Well I would argue that a 3x faster read and write speeds compared to a SATA ssd are pretty neat, but indeed you do need something else in order to boot from it.
Bios update?
I boot a 2010 Mac from NVME on a PCI-e card. A Bios update was needed.
@@ex-itguyThere is a tool that creates a bootable USB drive which can load drivers missing in the BIOS. I boot several older PCs and servers with it to further boot from NVMe.
Clover bootloader + USB thumbdrive or tiny USB MicroSD reader.
@@ex-itguy
True sir 💯
You actually can boot from an NVMe drive even your motherboard doesn't explicitly support it, as long as it supports UEFI (and your OS supports UEFI boot). Every single NVMe drive comes with an OpROM, which is basically a "UEFI driver" that tells the UEFI how to boot from it.
Also, there is one NVMe drive that is known to have a legacy OpROM, which allows you to boot from an OS installed in legacy BIOS boot mode (the motherboard still needs to support UEFI): the Samsung Pro 950.
Interesting, someone else mentioned something similar. My Phenom II system does support UEFI but I haven't gotten it to boot from the NVMe yet. Something to dig deeper into for sure!
I didn't get it to boot with an older board (which supports UEFI). I tried every disk/CSM/legacy setting combination, but it didn't work.
But what works is to boot from a SD card with rEFInd installed and that boots the system on the NVMe SSD.
I don't mind to use a SD card. Before adding the card I booted the complete OS from SD card, because all SATA ports are taken by the HDDs (it's a NAS). But having an OS on a SD card is not stable. Now it is stable. ;)
I believe you can boot from it if you deactivate "Legacy" boot options from your BIOS and put it exclusively to UEFI
@@Schwinni you would need to mod your bios to add nvme drivers
If you refer to Clover, you have your OS on hard drive. With SD/usb you just boot from legacy to a UEFI bootloader that accepts booting of your hard drive OS
I've used Clover on a USB stick and booted via NVMe on a non uefi first gen i7 for quite a few years. Was a little cumbersome to set up but worked very reliably afterward.
I got one for my OptiPlex, and after adding the relevant DXE driver to the UEFI, it could boot from the NVMe drive. Though it's PCIe 2.0, it's still considerably faster than any SATA SSD.
You probably get about the same speeds I got in this video then... I made a mistake. My test pc doesn't have 3.0 slots.
DXE driver? I am wanting to try this in my Precision 390, I tried an M.2 PCIe card adapter ten years ago, in it and in a then-new MSI AMD motherboard that had an erroneous product description as having an M.2 2280 slot on the motherboard, but neither would see the Samsung drive I had bought to pair with the MSI.
Thats interesting to know. My old B450... well it rocks (badly) under pressure!!!! If you have any updates, please let us know..... I have an old MSI B450 Max II.... pretty sure its seen its best years. But if anyone can advise how to make her dance again? To save time - MRS Gaming 850w Power, MSI Tomahawk Max Pro II Motherboard, 4x 8GB DDR4 (yes, only 3000hz), 2TB Nvme boot drive (about 100TB external) 4GB Nvidia 1050Ti.
yeah pcie 2.0 x4 is still fast
@@si4632 Agreed. For what I do - mostly data transfer and fairly basic gaming.... its fine. I have a few things to get done this year, but then I'll go for a "proper" gaming system again. But for now, I'm happy with my little all-rounder.
Actually a tutorial for the bootloader to boot from the NVME SSD on these older systems would be great !
I thought about including that but I thought the video was long enough as it is 😆
I need to figure out how that works with Windows. Linux isn't that hard: just make sure /boot is on a drive the bios can boot from.
@@ex-itguy In my case I have a 4th gen Haswell system with no m.2 slot and for using these adapters to boot from NVME I got to use some workaround since the bios doesn't support this !
There is a way to do it with Clover + mVME driver module. Doesn't take up too much space so a tiny sata SSD, SD-card or USB stick already works for the bootloader.
I think that would indeed the easiest way for systems like Windows that don't have the ability to put the kernel (/boot) on another partition.
@@uranium5694for something that old, you could probably get a cheap Chinese motherboard that has an NVME slot on it.
If you want to boot from your newly installed nVME SSD.. Bottom line is that these mostly work out-of-the-box with a 6th gen /DDR4 system or newer! For older systems you'll need Clover, a bootloader with nVME driver support on a supported bootable medium such as SD card, USB, old sata SSD. Cool stuff. Maybe you can include that in a follow-up video?
Cheers, A Current-IT guy
I was already planning on doing so, but I didn't want this video to get too long. :)
@@ex-itguy Looking forward to part 2!
@milescarter7803 Interesting! Thanks for bringing that up!
Even if the motherboard does not support NVMe drives, you can obtain support for boot from an NVMe drive by installing the Clover software to a USB and setting the motherboard BIOS to boot from the USB drive. I did this with 15 year old Asus Sabretooth motherboard, an AMD Fx6100 processor and an Fanxiana NVMe. It achieves access speeds to the NVMe of 1.5 GBps. I also believe, I can increase this speed because Sisift Sandra tells me that the motheboard supports PCI 2.0, 4 x lane rated at 5GBps and the Fanxiana NVMe is a Gen 3 (1 GBps to 16 GBps) and SiSoft Sandra states that the device is running in low power mode and that better performance can be achieved if the NVMe is switched to high power mode.
I have yet to find out how to do this,
I have read about it but have yet to play with it.
About the speed: I made a mistake and tested on 2.0. Should be a lot faster on 3.0. I'll try to redo the test next week on other hardware.
Good information about some M2 adapters. I remember building a gaming PC in 2008 with the same ATX case in the thumbnail pic.
Thanks! It seems to be a pretty well known case so I thought it would make a good thumb. I'm actually planning to move the hardware from my Phenom 2 machine in there though since it is quite a good case. :)
@@ex-itguy Whats the name of the case? I'm looking to buy one
Good question, it's a cooler master case. It came with the $27,73 pc a few videos back.
@@ex-itguy Nice. I think I remember getting the same case from Fry's electronics in late 2006. I miss that store.
Great video, thank you so much for taking the time! I have a six-year-old system and I was wondering if it would make sense to buy an adapter for NVMe. For my system, it wouldn't make sense. You've just saved me the money and hustle. Subscribed!
Note that there is an error in this video, which I addressed in the follow-up video. All readings were PCIe 2.0, on 3.0 the speeds doubled.
So if your 6yo system has at least a PCIe x4 slot available that's not shared with the GPU things might be different for you. :)
This will certainly get me thinking about interesting upgrades to old machine that I get hold of. Subscribed.
Leuke video! Die adapters zijn best interessant voor oudere computers! Een update lijkt mij wel leuk als je een moderner moederbord vindt 😊
Tja, toen ik een jaar geleden een M2 MacBook kocht wist ik nog niet dat ik dit soort experimentjes uit zou halen 🤣
I use a similar one on my main rig, just because one M.2 slot on my motherboard (Crosshair VII Hero) shares bandwith with the main x16 slot, and as this is a PCIe 3.0 platform, I want to give all the possible bandwith to my RTX 3080. The drive is in PCIe 2.0 slot but still more than fast enough for game storage.
If you are lucky you may find a modded bios with NVME support for your motherboard. I upgraded an old Haswell machine with a nvme m.2 ssd and a cheap pcie adapter and it really gives new life to this machine.
I actually use one in my PC build from last year. It had two nvme slots which infilled with 2 TB nvmes, than later got a good deal on a 1 TB drive so added it in with one of these.
Older mainboards will probably need a UEFI patch or workaround to be able to "see" the drive. That's what I did with my Asus M5A97 r2 board. Worked like a charm.
Experienced users at Win-RAID Forum can help you with this.
I've heard about it and will definitely check it out!
I used a 1x card on a J4125 ITX board to save the sata for nas storage (SATA high capacity drives were much cheaper at least at the time of build). CrystalDiskMark showed just over 900MB/s with a cheap Samsung OEM PCIe 3.0 NVMe that managed about 2,200MB/s on a true NVMe port. Was good enough for me.
Since upgraded server/Nas to a T500 on a 4x4 NVMe slot board that goes to about 7,300MB/s
Man I love this channel reminds of myself a little!! In my desktop I bought an Intel Optane SSD 900 and it is very fast even running at 3.0. I put one of those NVMe adapter cards in my son's computer and it made a difference at least it seems so. Thanks for the video and you have a new sub!
Thanks! Note that the speeds in this video were on PCIe 2.0. I have corrected that mistake in the follow-up video.
@ex-itguy yes you did great job!!
This is a cool concept
An interesting experiment and I shall look forward to part 2.
My Sarbent PCIe x16/x8/x4 adapter with a 970 does very well, over 3000, not 1500. I prepared a USB drive for proper booting as well
As mentioned in the pinned comment I made a mistake: I tested on PCIe 2.0... wil try to redo the tests on a machine with a 3.0 slot next week.
Great video must of read my mind, I was thinking about doing this a few days ago when I spotted one of these adapter's on eBay 👍
I made a dumb mistake though: I tested on PCIe 2.0... will try to do an update next week.
This kind of adapters work really well: I'm using two of them. One is PCIe 1X (so slow), but the other is a 4X job - quite snappy. And I bought these weird chinese ones, no boutique brand.
Super intresting!
I bought 2 PCIe 1x cards off ali express to try this too, only to find out that even m.2 gen 3's have hardly come down in price since gen 5 hit the market
Yeah it seems the size is the biggest factor. There's hardly even any difference between a SATA drive and an M.2 NVMe.
Gen 5 is still too new. Almost nobody is adopting it. But there are deals to be had on Gen 3 and 4 drives on the used market.
I upgraded a core2 e8400 with a cheap nvme adapter. Of course, a ssd sata is needed for bios boot. The adapter I use is pci-e 1x. I achieve the same speed with sata ssd than with 1-channel nvme, although the latency is somewhat lower... And I use Debian Linux which is far more flexible than m$ obeseware for installation
Imagine the speed boost when you spend 8 bucks on an X4 card haha
@ex-itguy yes, but no. The only pci-e 16x is occupied by the graphic card
Yeah that's an issue on a lot of systems. The Core2quad machine I had (actually the one in the thumb lol) doesn't have a second X16 slot either.
A company is contacted me about an external NVMe enclosure they wanted to send me. Would be interesting to see if that might be faster than the X1 card.
I also found out the same as you. I recently built a cheap gaming PC using a spare Dell Optiplex SFF i7. I had some space Nvme drives and so was hoping to use at least one. Well, none of the cards seem to have a low profile bracket, so the card is just sitting loosely in the slot. So not great. And as you noted, no bootloader on the cards so i cannot boot from it. So i have windows 11 on a Sata SSD, and saving game installs to the nvme. Its still nice a fast to be fair.
Interesting, both the X4 cards I tested came with a low profile bracket. There's a bootloader that should work with Windows as well, but I have to look into that myself as well. Linux is a lot easier in that aspect: just put the /boot partition on another drive.
My 11 year old ASUS H97 Plus has an M.2 slot but it couldn't find a 1TB M.2 NVME even when it shows the NVME settings after it was inserted.
I bought a Ugreen adapter, attached the 1TB M.2 and put it in the secondary x16 (PCIe 2.0, x4) and with my OS cloned to it, it boots fine. It still doesn't show in the BIOS where it's located, but the BIOS knows it's there and puts it in the boot menu.
Forgot to say, that M.2 uses legacy boot as that's how my OS installed originally. The BIOS can boot either legacy or UEFI.
ASUS H97 support Nvme boot ,incase not working upgrade the bios but not support PCI Express supported booting.
ua-cam.com/video/NGbbW6TqOvc/v-deo.html
Yeah I’m also looking forward for part 2
Followed since 4k subscribers; end of 2024. Great channel.🎉
Thanks! 😃
I have some of them, they make a lot of sense:
1. I have a cheap board without nvme slot, Asrock H510
2. I have a server and need all 6 sata onboard slots, the nvme slot blocks 2 sata when in use, the pcie slot doesnt
3. I use 2 nvme ssds on a board with only one nvme slot
The cheap chinese work as well as the branded ones. I am super satisfied with all of them😂👍
Btw:
I assume you need a bios supporting the nvme ssd. Didnt work for me on a Haswell board (Intel 4th gen, H81)
These cards are a godsend if you have old servers still sporting SAS-SATA drives, the latency and amount of IOPS is unbeatable. For any regular desktop use on older system I don't think you will see that much improvements in real-world light workloads compared to SATA 600 SSD's.
I'd say that probably most modern motherboards probably DO support booting from one of those adapters. I have a Z97 motherboard with a 4th generation Intel processor, that didn't have an M.2 slot, but one of those adapters worked just fine. One thing to be aware of, is that one of those adapters could potentially change how many lanes are allocated to your graphics card.
Someone else mentioned that as well, but another said he used one because _the M.2 slot_ shared lanes with the GPU.
Annoying stuff.
A lot of GPU's don't use all lanes though.
@@ex-itguy It depends on the motherboard and the chipset. Some motherboards get the M.2 lanes from the chipset. Others will get them from the processor. If there are multiple M.2 slots, it will sometimes be a combination. I don't know how they work, post Ryzen era, but previously, most boards would run the x16 slot at x8, when any of the other PCIE slots had anything in them. Some would then drop to x4, if you had something in the alternate full size slot, and something in any of the other slots.
In other words. having a drive in an M.2 slot doesn't necessarily affect performance, but having an adapter card in one of the PCIE slots almost definitely could. However, it's also true that at least as of the RTX 20 series, most cards didn't even come close to maxing out the x16 bandwidth. It might be different with the xx90 series. I don't know. Just be aware that there is potential to affect your system with PCIE accessories installed.
It's a good thing to keep in mind indeed. I'll have to figure out how to check for that on Linux (as I do most things, like this test, on Linux).
I had to BIOS mod my X79 by slipstreaming NVMe drivers into it; 3rd-4th Gen Intel was the cusp for it. Overall it depends on how the motherboard was built and the chipset it has. For example a motherboard like Intel H670 would funnel 20ish PCIe lanes over 8x 4.0 lanes, while something like H610 or AMD X870 would funnel fewer lanes over 4x 4.0 lanes.
Thank you for this video. I was planning on adding a NVMe to my older PC, using a Plug-in PCIe M.2 adapter, but have now change my mind, as it's not going to be much faster than the 1TB Samsung 870 EVO SSD I already have in my PC. Russ. UK
I think 3x SATA speed is a pretty good improvement though 😄
Don't forget the removal of the cables 😅
These adapters are handy not for just old PCs, but I guess motherboards that only have two M.2 slots. My current machine with a B550-F motherboard only has two (one of them PCI-e 4.0 x4, one of then PCI-e 3.0 x4), which only leaves me with some PCI-e 3.0 x1 slots. I'm the kind of person that adds storage--hate the idea of just tossing drives aside.
So my current build had a P5 Plus 1TB, and P3 Plus 1TB, before I upgraded to a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB. Guess what I did with the P3 Plus...ironically went with the same Glotrends adapter, over a year ago. The adapter has held up fine.
Would of been interesting to have tried the adapters with 2 different drives so as to see if the drives themselves may effect the results....As in the slowest adapter may work better with a different brand drive...and the faster worked slower with a different brand..as the controller on various drives may work differently with different adapters..Just a thought.
I don't have that many drives though, but it would've been more "scientific" that way 😄
@@ex-itguy I am guessing the slowest would still be the slowest as it has less connections on the board. (x1 vs x4?)
Indeed, it's severely limited by the amount of lanes.
By the way I speed tested my 2015 Macbook, which also has a pcie 3.0 nvme (just with a proprietary connector...) and it also got to 1.7GB/s like this drive did in the mini pc. So I guess that's the limit of a PCIe 3.0 connection.
you should check the PCIe Speed with tools like HWINFO64 - the second "x16" Slot in such old Mainboards is often only PCIe 2.x.
Actually, both are. I made a mistake as some people were good enough to point out.
Its also useful to update firmwares on nvme's kept in usb enclosures without having to resort to digging into your main rig as firmwares can't be updated over usb.
Huh?
Used to have this setup on my old Mac Pro from 2010. Was far faster than a SATA SSD at 1.5Gb/s max.
A Samsung 950 pro can be used on anything with a pcie slot. It installs its own "generic nvme drivers" into the mother board. So anything with even a pciex1 lane can use them for boot drives. A trick you can do, and I did, on a X58 system from 2008. A 950 pro in the top x1 slot. And a 980 pro as the boot drive. I was limited to I believe pcie gen2 speeds. But it was still 1600 read and write speeds. There is a Intel nvme drive that does the same thing. But it can be hard to find and expensive as heck. At least when I was looking for it.
Yeah the speeds in this video are all PCIe 2.0. I made a dumb mistake... I'm planning on picking up a board with an i5 and a PCIe 3.0 board on Monday so I can redo this test on an actual 3.0 slot. Should be quite a bit higher.
@ex-itguy that's absolutely fine. My pcie gen 2 got 1600ish speeds with those drives. I have had 6 of them systems I've built over the years. They work great. That X58 system is still my lan party unit. Got it paired with a RX 6950 XT. It's a thing of beauty.
Of course the PCIe one work but on some old computers you can't boot from them. Those are the computers made before NVME drives started showing up in all new computers. You can use them in those computers but you might not be able to boot from them because of BIOS support for that. They work as storage just fine if you can find the driver (assuming it is not already installed. They can be used in USB or Thunderbolt enclosures too. Use Thunderbolt if you can for the best speed.
The boot issue I addressed in the video as well, but there are workarounds. I'll probably make a video about that later on.
a lot of motherboards limit the amount of lanes to extra pci slots, so it's highly probable that you were using 2 lanes instead of 4, that match the theoretical speed of 2Gbs in gen 3. try to use the crystal disk info, cpuz or Aida to confirm that. good work!
There's no difference on my board. I tried but it's the same (didn't think that was very interesting to show). Since the m.2 slot in our mini pc provided about the same performance I think this is actually what you can expect on PCIe 3.0. :)
also in some motherboards the graphics card only gets the newest version and the other PCI-e lanes are slowest.
@@ElCidCampeador1994 I was not aware about that, thanks for the information!
The only thing I'd say you might wanna look into - the heatsink vs. speed logic is backwards. The drive runs well below its rating, and the conclusions is it doesnt need a HS because its so slow? I think maybe it is running slow because it doesnt have a heatsink, having experienced this with my drives a few times. It doesnt take any time for them to get hot when moving 1GB+/s, and they throttle when that happens. I have a Samsung rated for 7400 that will only ever do 2250 without a heatsink, several SPCCs that run 1/2 their rated speed without a heatsink, etc and so on. All of them perk rioght up and hit near or above rated speed with a heatsink, and I even put little fans on em. THey are adorable TBH.
The drive ran slow because I made a mistake: I tested on PCIe 2.0 (see also pinned comment). I will redo this test soon. Might even try the heatsink then. ;)
very informative. Thinking about how to hook up my nvme SSD to a 2015 system and see this video. Thanks!
Awesome! An updated video comes later today, because I made a mistake on this one. My test machine only had PCIe 2.0 slots. I just redid the tests on a board with a 3.0 slot. Short answer: twice as fast. ;)
Yessir,it's working.
But, from my own experience,only from 1151 motherboard and up you can boot from them adapters.
Probably yes, but this Phenom II is still a nice system and isn't able to. :)
I ran linux at nvme speeds on a pre UEFI based bios computer by using sata ssd only for the boot grub and boot partition which passed from there to an nvme with remainder of linux directories.
Unless I missed it, you didn't do any testing on a system with PCIe v2.0. I would expect that the results would be twice the speed of PCIe v1.0 and half the speed of PCIe 3.0.
I'm planning on finally upgrading my ASUS M5A97 R2.0 which has PCIe v2.0 (500MB/s per lane x16=8.00GB/s), 32GB of core & a 64-bit AMD FX™-4100 CPU. Its video card is actually designed for PCIe v3.0, so at least it can still be of use.
I figured I would put all the Windows/Linux/UNIX page file / swap space on one NVMe and the Boot drive on another NVMe. That way the SATA/USB bottleneck would only be on non-O/S data which doesn't update as much as the O/S data does.
I figure this old Mb would be a nice file server with a Rπ⑤ as the printer/scanner server as my Laser printers are RJ45 but my other printers are USB 2.0
You didn't see the pinned comment did you? ;)
Yes, I made a mistake. I tested on PCIe 2.0. Even the mini pc that does have PCIe 3.0 seems to use only 2 lanes on the M.2 slot, effectively slowing it down to 2.0 speeds.
I don't feel this mistake is bad enough to take the video down but I will create a follow up soon.
@@ex-itguyyeah watched the video and then went straight to writing my comment. I have a couple of new in the box, old 128-256GB NVMe drives lying around so I bought a couple of those 1x & 4× Slot adapters. I'm hoping that even at PCIe 2.0 speeds, an NVMe drive should be as fast if not faster that SATA 3.0 if I only put the Page File on one NVMe and only the O/S on the other. It's not as if they would be slower than SATA 3.0
Well since I tested on 2.0, it indeed is about 3x faster than SATA. Which is quite nice I think. :)
One correction, your board can still support pcie NVME drive even if the board doesn't have m.2 drive slot. Varies from brand to brand I have MSI and asus and both boards detect and boot from pcie nvne drives.
final thoughts section.. needs NVME bios mod w UBU Uefi bios updater for it to boot..
NVME is direct pcie so no boot rom on the adapter as its part of the ssd
I'm going to make an update video later, in which I'll cover multiple boot options.
On a ye olde systeme that requires a SATA boot drive, may be move the Pagefile across to the SSD...should speed up the machine quite a bit.
Interesting, didn't know these existed. I run my Core2Quad on an SSD without issue. The two 2.0 and one 1.0 PCI-E slots are taken up by three 9800 GTX+ cards.
In that case this won't help you haha, as mentioned in the pinned comment I made a mistake. The tests were done on PCIe 2.0. Do yours should be able to reach the same speeds if you were to clear up a PCIe 2.0 slot.
start thinking about more of a server board - 4 nvme in a raid0 - probably the way you want to go - will saturate 100g bonded
such an adapter, because my computer has one M.2 connector. I bought a small disk quite a while ago, and now the prices have dropped. It's a shame to throw it away. Now I can continue using it for a small price.
Hi, what equipment are you using to capture the bios setup? Have tried a few vga-hdmi and they can't capture it. Thanks again.
I use a Magewell DVI plus I bought used for €60. Plus a VGA to DVI adapter I bought on Amazon for a few bucks, because it didn't come with the used Magewell. Works pretty well on VGA. Even DOS resolutions do pretty well on this thing. :)
Edit: no wait the VGA to DVI adapter I already had in my box of cables. Didn't buy that one.
Good video for older - maybe secondary PC's.
What software where you using to the Benchmark?
It's Gnome Disks, which is the reason I booted a Gnome-centred distro for these tests. :)
There's a mistake in this video: my test pc only has PCIe 2.0 slots. I have been testing speed on a board with an actual 3.0 slots today and can already tell you speeds are twice as high on a 3.0 slot. :)
@@ex-itguy Thanks
The case you have in the thumbnail.. I have the exact same case (it's from 2004 or something)... Now it's my NAS. I do love the case though, I got mine with sound deadening and it's really really heavy... Also an ex-IT guy btw :-) worked for about 20 years, then I wanted to try something completely different...
Cool! Same here by the way, I have worked in IT for about 24 years and was done with it. Started as a freelance singer and voiceover and actually made this channel as a way to promote my voiceover work... but it's getting a bit out of hand 😂
I use one of these in an ivy bridge system. The adapter steals express lanes from the GPU, thereby increasing the bottleneck.
Oh that's not good. Interestingly someone else commented using one of those _instead_ of his M.2 slot because _that one_ shared lanes with the GPU.
This might actually be good for my mATX pc, since m.2 ssds are pretty cheap now and I have limited space for another SATA ssd
You could have added a short manual how to boot from a different boot device if your BIOS doesn't support NVME. To shortly summarize, just put the bootloader (lilo, grub or syslinux) and /boot on a bootable device. That way I was able to make an old P4@3Ghz work with a SATA-6G (I literally put in an old 850MByte PATA HD just for booting and shut it down using hdparm after booting) and a Core2 from an M.2 card (I boot from a 2GByte USB-Stick). Booting from Network using PXE/BootP often works surprisingly well too, even my oldest 486 and SGI systems can boot that way, but my servers changed to often so I stop doing that.
That doesn't work for things like Windows or Haiku though, that's why I didn't include it yet. I have to test it on something other than Linux for people running Windows first.
@@ex-itguy syslinux might be the way to go. You can boot it from pretty much anything from MBR, GPT, PXE or some ARM-specific Low-Level-Devices and whatever and it can load and execute RAM-Disks and a lot of other boot-loaders, including the Windows-Bootloader sitting in the EFI-Boot-Partition. Though you usually compile a fitting syslinux-Loader yourself, the ones supplies with distributions (internally UEFI/GPT Linux mostly uses syslinux while MBR Linux still prefers grub) are usually optimized for the mundane task of loading its own Linux-Kernel from a Standard-Mass-Storage-Device.
@@ex-itguy Ignore my last suggestion, there is even a more easy way: Install a dummy Windows on an USB stick (you can downstrip it to bare minimum), then add an Entry in the Boot-Loader of Windows for the M.2 Stick. The Kernel usually is part of the Windows-Boot-Partiiton and with it comes M.2 drivers.
i didn't use that explicitly to use an M.2 stick but was successful in using it to run Windows from a non-bootable RAID-card.
Interesting tests. I have a Dell 9020MT mobo rebuilt into an Antec 300 case and am using a NVME adapter on it too. This setup was a gen 4 system though so no boot support for NVME stuff even when connected via adapter card.
But I lucked out and someone made a modified UEFI rom I could reflash the mobo with and now it has UEFI boot support for my NVME SSD connected via adapter. I checked and yeah got the 4x PCI card. I'm not sure if I'm getting 3.0 speeds though. I think this mobo has a 3.0 slot but it's only the blue slot which my graphics card occupies.
The SSD adapter is plugged into the second 16x slot. Also note with a mobo this old having a 4x NVME connected ends up taking 4 lanes away from the graphics card because the CPU only has 16 lanes available...at least that's how I recall it working with gen 4 Intel boards. So you'll maybe lose a bit of graphics performance...though in most cases on systems this old you'll end up CPU bottlenecked before you can max out graphics card bandwidth I imagine so not something I'm concerned about. I only have a 970Ti in the main slot anyways. :P
Does that GPU use all 16 lanes though? A lot of them don't.
Note that I made a mistake by testing on a machine with PCIe 2.0 slots, so I guess speeds should be similar for you?
@@ex-itguy Yeah maybe. It's old enough that it might not use all 16 lanes but I checked and specs indicate that it does?
Idk, on Linux you can check with "lspci -vv" (as root). On Windows a tool like GPU-Z should be able to tell you.
Hows the Boot Speed on Windows 10 with m2 NVME PCle on old PCs that doenst have a slot? Im very Curious vs Sata SSD if there any difference between the transfer, loading and other things.
That's a good question. Not a Windows guy so I haven't tested that. Might be interesting to test though, could be a short video.
For older gen systems the diffrence is not huge, but it's noticable. The r/w speeds are way better ofc
A PC must have a BIOS that can boot from the PCIe slots. Those cards have no BIOS add on. They are great for speeding up application load times. Check the bios of your mobo to see if there is a PCIe option for booting.
There's ways around that, but without too much tinkering you're absolutely right.
How about using a Bifurcated pcie controller and get in some cases 3000mbs?...or more if you use a RAID configuration. I've seen some pretty low price on alliexpress. I'm currently using one dual NVMe I bought on amazon for $150. I'me seeing almost double per NVME. Bifurcated cards have a chipset on the card that allows you for use all the PCIe lanes.
Note that I made a mistake in this video, that's why I followed up pretty soon. The speeds are actually PCIe 2.0. On 3.0 it's twice as fast.
Intro music sounds like System of a Down?
That's quite the compliment! Thanks! 😄🤘🏻
@@ex-itguy wait was that not AI generated? Really well done if that’s you lol
Not sure if I take _that_ as a compliment haha! No it's music from Wacky Wheels with me singing over it. :)
These adaptors only small lanes get one with 16 lane slot instead of the 6 lane ones you got
An m.2 slot only uses 4 lanes. The X4 cards are perfectly fine. X16 cards are nice if you'd like to put four of them on a card. Total overkill in this setup.
Usually needs a bios mod to work as well on older systems
That or a bootloader on another drive. I'll probably get into that another time.
Interesting. What program/OS did you run the benchmarks on? Would have been nice to summarize the speeds in a chart for easy comparison as well. Glad you mentioned that you can't boot from them unless they have a boot rom. I wonder how the best way to "boot" the system so the minimum reading is done from "regular" drive (or very small SSD on SATA connection). That is, start boot from the SSD, and then use the files on the NVME to finish the booting.
If you're running Linux you can just place your boot partition(s) on another drive (can even be a flash drive). For Windows you will need a bootloader that can read from the nvme. Clover seems promising but I haven't gotten around to testing that solution.
I used Gnome Disks for this very unscientific test 😄
Note that there's a mistake in this video, which I addressed in the next one. The speeds in my test system were PCIe 2.0. On a board with a 3.0 slot speeds doubled.
I did this on a 4th gen intel mb years ago and got it to boot natively by adding a driver to the uefi bios. It wasn't that difficult to do but a little nerve wracking to not brick the mb (it was still my main pc back then). If the mb is too old to have uefi this will not work.
Hello, try searching for Clover Bootloader NVME, I think this is how is done when your motherboard dont have support for booting from a NVME.
I have read about it but haven't tested it yet as you don't need it for Linux.
you know what would be nice? one nvme on the m.2 port of a more modern mobo, and another nvme on one of those adapter cards, then running both in RAID 0 to see what speeds you can achieve
Probably a lot haha, although you would be limited to software raid in that setup.
I have one of these cheap nvme to pcie boards in my x79 build. I get great speeds using PCIe 3.0; around 3300MB/s read and write. Also full Nvme boot support with a modded bios.
Yes, I made a mistake and tested on 2.0. Will redo this test hopefully next week. I'm interested to see if there are bigger differences between the cards.
Cool, good way to add a nvme drive. Personally using mint I can not tell the difference between a 7200 rpm HDD and a pcie 3 nvme SSD though. SSD with laptops are great for durability and power efficiency that is the biggest advantage that they have. Great video!
Thanks! Spinning harddrives are definitely a lot slower than SSDs. You should be able to notice that for sure. :)
Even If you use a sata ssd as a boot drive you can already see the difference booting but especially patching your system compared to a rotating disk.
@@ex-itguy Yeah I use both but to me it does not make a massive difference on linux. It is faster but I just don't find it to be absolutely necessary. SSDs are still nice though especially for laptops.
@@nielsdebakker3283Yeah I use SSDs on a few machines. It is faster I just don't find it to be as big of a difference as people say it is that's all.
I have managed boot NVMe via USB DOM with CloverEFI and DUET (BIOS to UEFI/GPT) installed, sadly DUET can't support AMD and it just stuck at "Welcome to EFI World"
Bios has to support it mostly NvMe boot support was commonly on 8 th genertion
modes.Macpro was an exemption 4,1 & 5,1 with firmware 14.0.0.0 works amazing
(LGA1366) cannot compare with other intel motherboards test 70 Plus MacPro Models.
Only to boot from it. And there's workarounds for that.
Adapters make little to no difference as long as they are PCIe x4, I have a no name PCIe x4 adapter. Kingston KC3000 gen4 NVMe in second slot of my MB which is also gen4 bu x8 and it works at exact peed as other KC3000 in first M.2 slot. Those single M.2 adapters are very simple as they are nothing more than just small size physical connection to PCIe slot. As NVMe drive prices are same as for for 2.5" SATA SSDs, it's not only at least double the speed but also require no cables and are much smaller. They also make good transportable drives once fitted in a USB housing adapter.
There was a slight difference between the two X4 cards though. No idea why, I expected them to be the same.
I need to make an updated video because I made a dumb mistake: my system only has PCIe 2.0 slots.
@@ex-itguy As far as I have seen it, difference is at level of statistical error, you'd have to run benchmark 10 times and find some middle value. Not even worth mentioning. SSDs operation also depends also on state of cells readiness tor writing and weather garbage collection did it's job and turned cells with deleted files back to 0 because just deleting data still keeps cells in same condition.
using nvme adapter on old z87 motherboard and install windows in it with some tweaks requiring you to always plug in the usb drive or it wont't boot to windows, but somehow don't know what i am doing exactly now my pc can boot without usb drive.
That's weird, if you haven't changed anything. But glad it works, I guess. :)
Works great even if I can't boot from it, Has my whole steam library on it
Old PCs that could benefit most from this have PCI slots, not PCI Express slots. Wprking on a retro PC right now that still uses IDE connections. It can use SATA. It has some PCI slots but nothing newer.
That are _very_ old pc's haha, even the P4 I have here that's two decades old has a PCIe slot. ;)
I was thinking about buying a 44 pin laptop IDE to NVMe adapter case though, see if I can address these 500GB on my P3 laptop haha
I use this on my Z87 deluxe board, with bios mod so i use it as boot drive.
i get 800-1000 mb.sec at a pcie 3.0x1 slot adapter, these adapters are amazing. also i get 300-400 at usb 3.0 adapters .. nvme are the future disks
Yes, I made a mistake: I tested on PCIe 2.0. I was convinced that my Phenom II system had 3.0 slots but I was wrong.
I will redo the test soon.
Why not use a heat sink thermal pad?
Just not fit the test. I re-testef because I made a mistake in this one, see my latest video. In that one I tested with the heatsink as well.
I am going to test some installation with PCIe card to U.2 SSD next week. I am curious to know if it is going to work, and how fast.
Note that I did make a mistake: my system only has PCIe 2.0 slots. So the speeds you see in this video should be a lot higher on 3.0. I'm seeking out a board that has 3.0 slots for a rebound video.
@@ex-itguy I have spent some time for this, seeking an affordable MB with bifurcation, and enough PCIe 3.0 and or 4.0.
If you have a bigger budget than me, then workstations motherboards should comply your needs.
I wish I had a big budget haha
Luckily my videos get more views lately so I'm finally getting back a bit of what I'm investing in hardware for this channel. ;)
So is the nvme running at pcie 2.0 still faster than a sata ssd? I'd like to try that on an intel ivy bridge, but it only offers 16 3.0 lanes, so the gpu uses all of it, leaving only pcie 2.0 x 4 from the chipset.
As people pointed out I made a mistake. My system only has 2.0 ports. So yes, about 3x SATA speed on PCIe 2.0.
TY for shearing.
I'm in the predicament with one nvm slot and don't know if I will get better performance as I run 7 instances of diablo 2 resurrected and the loading is slow. So I was thinking of moving 2 to a drive each !?
Not sure if that will help. Maybe get a raid card and get them striped?
@@ex-itguy ty. I googled it and it sounds good.
Did you mount the new drives before testing it?
No, you can't properly test a mounted drive.
what is the name of the benchmark software you are using?
Nothing special, it's Gnome Disks
@@ex-itguy Thanks bro ♥
does this work with bootable windows XP?
No idea, but Windows usually needs storage divers and I don't expect them to be available for XP.
@ex-itguy still wondering tho, I heard people on forum had done modified the nvme driver available for XP
No reason to be on xp no more. It's a virus playground. Windows 10 about to die out as well. Linux or Windows 11 pick one.
@@100Bucks some people have an XP machine for gaming. I can see how ultra fast storage would be nice for that. :)
I believe that these adapters would benefit from IKEA style instruction manuals. Keep the text for the warranty card. 😉
Then you might get an allen wrench as well, cool stuff! 😄
first everywhere i look it says pcie x 1 is faster than sata
Data transfer
PCIe is faster than SATA because it uses multiple lanes to transmit data. PCIe uses four lanes, while SATA only uses one
second can i install the pcie x1 adapter without the pc bracket ?
There's a mistake in this video, my system only had PCIe 2.0 slots. That's why I did a follow up to retest. On 2.0 an X1 is slower than SATA. On 3.0 it's slightly faster, but not much.
@@ex-itguy yeh confusing for me . mywife bought a pc for her grandson and small shop without telling me and was sold a piece of crap . it has an asus prime a320m micro motherboard with 1 m2 slot with a 256gb card which is a crap mb and is now full . it only has a 2 x PCIe 2.0 i need to get more storage but cannot afford to lose the shops delivery software or i would just buy a bigger m2 and reinstall windows
@@stevethom407 you could use an X1 card just to copy the contents of the internal drive to a new, bigger one? Or a usb enclosure so you can use the old one as a glorified usb stick. ;-)
Something like clonezilla can help you with cloning the drive. RescueZilla and Redo Rescue I haven't tried yet but these look even easier to use.
@@ex-itguy yes thanks what i am thinking of doing is getting a 1tb nvme m2 putting it into the pciex1slot then migrate or clone the mb m2 then swop them around but i am not sure if the new m2 will boot ok .. as it uses shop software i cannot lose anything
@@stevethom407 If you use any of the cloning tools I mentioned, you should be fine. I can't imagine the drive itself is anything special so if you copy the whole drive (including partition info) everything should work.
Linus has a "hack/work around" video on how to make NVME boot up drive on old motherboards that don't support booting up from NVME.
I stil have to look into that, but indeed there are multiple solutions
the adapter was working fine for the last two months but now the speed is choopy, any fix
That's weird. Did you do a hardware test to check if everything is alright?
@ex-itguy how to do hardware test. Just bought it 2 months back, no physical damage. Reading speed is working as usual, takes 25 seconds to transfer 48 gb but to write/copy takes 4 min
Not sure, I guess you could just use smartctl to query the drive's status. Not much more you can do without another M.2 slot to check the NVMe drive in, or another NVMe to test the adapter card with.
@@ex-itguy Perhaps it due to window 11 upgrade. Have checked the smartcltr, no issue. have to check whether it is due to adapter or nvme
Where did you find nvme to SATA adapters? Show me one.
I found a few which I had shown on screen, like this one: amzn.to/409pVdL
However, that one takes a b-key M.2 card, which are already SATA ssds so I guess there's no conversion going on.
There's also cards like this one: amzn.to/3DBrZCQ
That takes both a b- and an m-key ssd. I believe you need to have a b-key sata drive in the b-key slot in order for an m-key to work. But I haven't tried those myself.
@@ex-itguy The first one is a b-key, so can't use an nvme there.
In the second one, you can put one SATA M.2 and connect it using the SATA port. The second slot, the NVME slot, is used only through the SFF-8654 port, which connects to a PCI-E adapter.
So yea, we can say there's no nvme to sata adapter.
Yeah that seems to be the case
Thanks for the info.
Valeu pelo vídeo, também comprei um adaptador x1 pra minha placa mãe
aren't they all on the same pcie x4? what difference does it make?
Not sure what you mean?
@@ex-itguy i mean you bought 3 adapters but they all run at the same speed, say 1600 mbps on their spec. sheet and you put them all in the same slot, what's the point of speed testing here?
The point is trying out if there's a difference. As you could see the X1 card was about 4x slower than the X4 cards (which was to be expected, but I wanted to test that). Also, the cheapest X4 card performed just a tiny bit less than the first one so there sure is a difference.
I made a dumb mistake though: my machine doesn't have 3.0 slots at all, so these tests were done on 2.0 speeds. I hope to be able to make a follow up next week on actual 3.0 speeds. See if the differences are different from this test.
@@ex-itguy that's a lot of work testing again with 3.0. my point is you can just look at the spec. of all x4 adapters where you bought them. i think their speed are the same not a tiny bit less. the only time the speed is half less than each adapter i tested is when the nvme is on usb adapter not internal adapter directly attached to the board, 1000 mbps and 500 mbps (the websites i bought from stated the spec. of the speed) but if it's internal, speed are the same.
It's not that much work and I feel I should rectify this. And specs can lie, especially on cheap Chinese hardware. :)
This computer can't have full 3.0 speeds. It looks like it is an older board that only has 2.0 speeds. And, I sure wish you'd cover how to have a bootloader on a USB or a SSD. Because I have an older motherboard that I would love to boot from a USB, and then run stuff off the NVMe. But, back then, I could never figure out how to do it.
You are right, I already mentioned it in the pinned comment and description. This test was done on 2.0. I'm planning to redo the test on another board I'm picking up next week.
It's not all that hard to modify the UEFI BIOS so you can boot from the NVMe, there are good tutorials. Just take care that you save the original BIOS somewhere safe, and handy in case it goes wrong. But to the motherboard, it's just the original BIOS.
I happen to have that exact same athlon 64 computer! lol
I just use an old 128gb SATA drive with board max RAM.
Works ok with linux on it.
Not worth a NvME drive as the cpu would bottleneck the transfer rate.
Yeah this test I think only wires zeros so that could be a limiting factor.
What software to benchmark
Gnome disks :)
great work
Thanks!
Can you boot from them?
Only if your bios supports it, although some commenters mentioned a hack to make it possible on older systems as well.
@@ex-itguy Tanks verry much.
As far as I know, the speed is GBit per second, not GByte p.s.
B is Byte, b is bit. And 4 Gbit/s doesn't even come close to these readings. But I did make a mistake, I tested on PCIe 2.0.
A video with new tests will hopefully be ready by the end of today.