Question about booting from NVMe drive

I have a brand new Ryzen 2700X system with an X470 motherboard and I bought my first NVMe drive to go with it. My plan is to use it as my boot drive, and I am cloning my current boot drive to it.

My question is do I need to do anything specific to get the NVMe drive to boot? The motherboard manual suggests that I might have to use RAID settings, but I don't plan to use the drives in a RAID configuration. I am thus slightly confused.

Would anyone be able to shed any light on this?

There is nothing special that you have to do to boot from an NVME PCI-E M.2 device.

Make sure that you put it in M.2_1, which supports PCI-E X4. (M.2_2 only does PCI-E X2.)

I boot from an NVME drive, but it's an add-in card variety, rather than an M.2. It's currently in an X570 mother board, but previously it was in an Asus Crosshair VII Hero (X470).

Gurn Blanston said:

The motherboard manual suggests that I might have to use RAID settings, but I don't plan to use the drives in a RAID configuration. I am thus slightly confused.

Don't know what AMD boards have for settings (only use Intel), but if the motherboard allows AHCI just use that instead of RAID. You'll also want AHCI anyway for UEFI setup.

And yes, you can use NVMe as boot drives. Both my desktop systems boot off NVMe drives.

CountMike said:

That's what I did a year ago, installed Samsung 960 evo and cloned whole system drive from SATA SSD it resided in. Actaull I didn't just clone it but first made a Macrium Reflect backup and restored it to NVMe. That's all it took.

And change the boot order in the bios once the cloning is complete. Did the same when I got my NVMe drive. Once Windows had loaded for the first time, made sure it was the NVMe and not the previous SSD, ran for a few days to make sure everything was OK and then wiped the SSD for other uses.

sygnus21 said:

Don't know what AMD boards have for settings (only use Intel), but if the motherboard allows AHCI just use that instead of RAID. You'll also want AHCI anyway for UEFI setup.
And yes, you can use NVMe as boot drives. Both my desktop systems boot off NVMe drives.

NVMe replaces AHCI as access protocol.

I use an AMD laptop that boots from NVMe. No reference to "AHCI" in the firmware setup.

Anibor said:

NVMe replaces AHCI as access protocol.

???

sygnus21 said:

???

NVMe drives will not use an AHCI SATA port. NVMe is a totally separate port and driver:



Although your motherboard UEFI settings will likely still have AHCI settings for the SATA ports on it.