New
#1
Boot from one drive, and run Windows from another
So... I have an old HP Z600 workstation which is pretty awesome with dual Xeons and 48GB of ECC ram. My problem is that storage speed is a huge bottleneck. Due to its age the motherboard and BIOS only support SATA II (3 GB/s) which limits the speed of a SSD. I found a Marvel SATA III PCIe controller which works, but the BIOS will only allocate one lane, so it's still limited to about 4 GB/s. I have the latest BIOS and the BIOS is encrypted so none of the 3rd party BIOS hackers have had any success at updating it and adding new functionality.
So... I took a chance and bought a Samsung 970 NVMe M2 drive and a PCIe adapter knowing that I would probably not be able to boot from it, and I was correct. Once Windows starts and loads its own NVMe driver though, it recognizes the drive just fine. And WOW is it A LOT faster. (A minimum of 4 times faster, up to 10 times, depending on which benchmark you look at.)
So... The machine also includes a couple of WD HDDs which are plugged into the motherboard's SATA II ports. I was hoping to find a way to get the machine to start its boot from a HDD, load the bare minimum necessary to recognize the NVMe drive, then switch over and finish booting, and more importantly, run Windows from the NVMe drive.
Is this do-able? Could someone perhaps give me a summary of how it might be accomplished and steer me towards some documentation with the details?