I have an aging motherboard in my computer which I built in 2010. The mobo is Gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 (rev2). It has only one PCIe slot that is revision 2 and the graphics card occupies that slot. The other three PCIe slots are all revision 1 (note 1). There is a PCIe X16 slot available that operates at X4 so it should support rates up to 1GB/s. This is faster than sata 3 and a lot faster than sata 2 rates which is all the mobo supports. I’m wondering if I could buy an adapter to convert the X4 PCIe revision 1 slot to an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD in order to increase my rates up or close to the 1GB/s limit of the revision 1 PCIe slot (I'd like to do this for the Windows 10 C: drive only). I’m not certain what other requirements are needed or how to tell if my aging mobo would permit booting to the newer M.2 NVMe SSDs. Help is appreciated.
Note 1: This is also curious. The three slots that Gigabyte calls PCIe revision 1 are all on a bus that connects to the P55 chipset. The Intel spec for the P55 chipset states its PCIe bus is revision is 2. Accordingly, I don’t understand why these PCIe lanes are not operating at revision 2 rates.
@Ramhound wrote: “You cannot typically boot from a device plugged into a SATA PCIe card.”
Thanks for the comment @Ramhound.
I was poking around the BIOS yesterday. Under Advanced Bios Features / Hard Disk Boot Priority, it listed all detected disks and "Bootable-add-in-cards" as an option. Of course, there are no add in cards installed so none were detected and the references to such cards ended there. This seems to imply that the BIOS is capable of booting from a (SATA III ??) disk that is added by means of one of those PCIe “Bootable-add-in-cards” (I understand that an NVMe disk is out for me). What do you think? Am I reading too much into this? What else would the "Bootable-add-in-card" option be used for in the boot priority menu if not to add a (sata?) drive to boot from? Thanks for your help. I may know enough about this stuff to be dangerous.