Are there any pitfalls to avoid in buying PCIe/m.2 adapters?
I'm planning on giving an older machine a small upgrade with an SSD, but since that machine does not have an m.2 port, I was thinking about buying the cheapest PCIe adapter I could find. Besides the obvious stuff like ports, PCIe gen and lane count, is there anything I should look out for? Specifically regarding Linux?
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If your machine doesn't have UEFI, only a few early NVMe SSDs are bootable, for example the Samsung 950 Pro. If you can't find one, you could try installing the bootloader on a USB stick.
It's not that old and currently UEFI boots from a SATA SSD.
Maybe let's start with what the board+CPU is and we can make more informed recommendations. I do tend to agree with many posters in that in boards that don't already have an NVMe slot, adding a card for NVMe versus performance gains (against an SSD) may not be worth it.