Would it be possible to make a NVMe ssd through the PCIe slot on a dell OptiPlex 960 sff? I have the slot but don't know if the the bios would support a boot drive of that nature. Or should I just convert my HDD to a 2.5inch SDD instead?
I'm using a NVMe drive attached to a PCIe card on a home built PC. But only as a data drive.
My understanding is that you could use a NVMe as a boot drive attached to such a card IF the motherboard would support booting from a NVMe drive attached directly to an NVMe port. I think the PCIe card just acts as a pass-through.
I stand to be corrected on that---I never investigated it seriously as I knew I wasn't going to boot from the drive. My motherboard does support NVMe booting, but I'm not going to update my boot drive until my next total rebuild.
In the real world, I doubt if you'd notice much difference between SATA and NVMe as a boot device, although I understand the appeal of fewer cables, having the latest and greatest, and benchmarks.
You'd have to drill into Dell support documents to see if your motherboard supports NVMe booting. Or maybe go to Crucial and see if their configurator would want to sell you an NVMe drive, given your model number.
I think they date from 2009-2010 ish. The bios is unlikely to have nvme module. You could probably mod it.
I am using a modded bios on a gigabyte b75 board ( modified by gigabyte recently).
Ask at win raid
Forum - [Guide] How to get full NVMe support for all Systems with an AMI UEFI BIOS
Somebody might have made one already. There are quite a lot being shared. If not, you can ask if they will do one for you.
So I probably would be safe to just use a 2.5 ssd as a bootable drive instead? It would have been nice to utilize the PCIx slot and keep my old 1TB hhd on the sata drive cable as a storage device and use a small M.2 or NVMe ssd to boot the OS from.
That is easiest. Depends how adventurous you are.
According to Dieter the samsung 950 pro has it's own oprom which allows booting in bios mode/mbr partitioning - I am not sure what if anything needs doing to the bios in that case.
Im thinking I could install a SSD and a bit more ram and I could probably get a few more years out of this old girl before retirement. I have 8GB of ram and it running windows 10 pro 64bit edition. At idle my ram is at about 45% so I could use a bit more.
nvme disks are not cheap. You could probably make other worthwhile upgrades to your machine for less.
The payoff from an SSD will be much higher than going from 8 to 16 RAM or going from SATA SSD to NVMe SSD.
I can get ddr2 ram for pretty cheap so I probably will go both 2.5 ssd and more ram. what software do you recommend to clone the os for a bootable drive these days?
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