I’m currently booting off exterenal USB drives and would like to move to a more stable boot option. I have a C2750D4I motherboard inside of a fractal node 304 and space is tight. I checked the specs are my board and I have an available PCIe x 8 SLOT7: PCIe2.0 x8 slot available that should give me the clearance to add the additional two M2 drives. My knowledge of this type of implementation is grey and could use some suggestions on hardware and drives for this conversion. I did try adding two additional SATA drives to my mobo but I think my PSU was not playing nicely with a 1 IDE to 2 SATA power adapter so I thought I’d go this PCIe route.
That motherboard is quite old. I am not sure if it can boot off of NVMe drives.
Passive PCIe to M.2 adapter cards are the cheapest and easiest options. However you can only get more than one drive this way if your system supports bifurcation on that PCIe slot.
You can look into your bios and check if you have a bifurcation setting for “x4x4” mode (should be somewhere in the PCIe settings). If you have that setting you can have up to two NVMe drives in your x8 Slot. Otherwise you can have only one.
You can search for “M.2 NVME to PCIe” in your web shop of choice. You can usually get this kind of adapter for less than 10$.
You can then install any NVMe SSD into the adapter card. Do not use SATA M.2 SSD, they will not work with this kind of adapter.
If you’re unlucky your UEFI bios won’t be able to boot from these drives. I don’t know how you could check if your BIOS supports booting from a NVMe drive.
don’t know if the motherboard support bifurcation, but seems that the CPU doesn’t, as bacon already said you can probably use a cheap adapter but with only 1 nvme, and it is not guaranteed that the maiboard let you boot from it (in little my experience, i couldn’t boot on 1155 maiboards, close as age as yours).
There are some NVME controller that not require bifurcation, but they are really a lot expensive, and i don’t know if is worth just for boot with a 8x pcie lane.
Honestly, if your drive is really an USB stick, just move to a SSD with an adapter SATA to USB, still more reliable and viable
I did some research and found a thread referring to a BIOS update for the C2750D4I supporting bifurcation. I’m already worried to update the BIOS as it’s pretty rock solid so far. It’s an older board and has been chugging right along.
Intel specs site Is so reliable
Btw, on the asrock website Is not mentioned this feature in the BIOS list (only the improvement on m.2/NVME), Is linked in the thread and i miss It?
IMHO updating the BIOS shouldn’t be so scaryng like some years ago (i have repaired a motherboard with corrupted BIOS with a 4€ programmer from AliExpress ), but honestly in your place i would have pref the easy way (the single NVME), in worst case and system doesn’t boot you have just spent a couple of euros
Agree with your SATA to USB adapter idea - I use a StarTech.com USB 3.1 to 2.5" SATA Hard Drive Adapter - USB 3.1 Gen 2 10Gbps with UASP External HDD/SSD Storage Converter (USB312SAT3CB) from Amazon to boot my repurposed Qnas 253D box - works fine with an Adata SP900 Premier Pro (256Gb) running Scale 24.10.2.
I’m running out of ideas on what to do with this USB dilemma. Maybe upgrading my MOBO and power supply is my next best option. Any suggestions for something I could use “bang for buck until I can find a better upgrade path?”
