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?
If you buy one with multiple M.2 slots, then your motherboard need to support lane bifurcation, if it just have one, it should work with no issue, however, I never booted an OS from these things.
Also, why not just a sata ssd if it's just to revive a PC? It might be cheaper no?
Mainly because I have an m.2 from another machine in the drawer, so the costs are zero.
But from my (admittedly very short) research, the prices are almost the same, regardless of the format.
As long as the system is new enough that the UEFI supports NVMe, it will be able to boot from it. It doesn't matter whether or not an adapter is used since the adapter is passive.
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.
They're some boot issues using the adapter. I had some difficulty getting the BIOS to identify the adapter as a bootable HDD. Unfortunately I don't remember how I solved it, but it was solvable. But you asked for potential pitfalls, so there's one. Heat is also another issue. You don't need to pay 200% more to get a NVMe drive with a heatsink already installed, you can just buy a normal NVMe and slap a $5 heatsink from Amazon onto it. I did that and it worked well.
Unless your buying a superspeed pci-e gen 4 drive you really don't even need a heatsink for most drives.
Haha) me trying to fit pcie gen 4 ssd into pcie gen 1 motherboard)
Startech does a M.2 SSD to 2.5" SATA drive adapter.
Unless you are using a SATA NVMe, these either don't work or seriously bottleneck your performance
He didn't specify what sort of M.2 SSD he has so I thought that I would throw it out there as an option.
Plus as he said it was for an older computer & was looking for the cheapest adaptor that works, I guessed that he wasn't too concerned about getting the most performance possible out of the setup.
Get as slow as you can, pcie 4 nvmes get pretty toasty and without proper cooling they will throttle anyway. Either that or make sure you get cooling options.
Not all adapter cards are the same or will run every ssd in every motherboard. I have half a dozen of those things because one brand will work in one computer with one type of ssd and not in any others.
If you get one with multiple, make sure your motherboard can split your pcie lanes so you can access all ssds on the card. Or find one with a pcie switch, though that can slow things down if you are not careful.
Stay away from dell and hp branded stuff unless it is going into a dell or hp. Dell made this awesome four ssd card with fan and everything, can only get it to run in dells.
I heard of bifurcation in that context, but how is that called in "mainboard spec lingo"? What buzzword should I worry about?
It's a Dell, so I'm safe here.
Somewhere in the bios will be a pcie option, it will look like “4x4x8” or “8x8” or some combination of the like. Most dell workstations and servers have this option that I have run into. If you don’t see this in the bios then you will only be able to run one nvme ssd
Not gonna lie, unless you have some specific workloads that require faster storage access you are not going to see much improvement by swapping in nvme ssd over sata ssd..
Since your board doesn't have m.2 slot, I assume it's rather old system and would probably get best performance boost by swapping CPU to faster one on same socket. You can probably find a 2nd hand fitting i7 for the same price you'd pay for the pcie card for m.2 slot. Also ram upgrade to 16gb or more (if not kitted already) could be beneficial
That isn't accurate. I used a PCIe adapter for an m.2 HDD on my wife's computer and she's getting 400% faster write speeds.
OP was speaking about "a small upgrade", most probably in general performance. 400 MB/s write speed won't make the OS itself any faster than with a normal SATA SSD.
I said 400%, not 400MB/s. 4x faster is definitely a noticeable upgrade.
@Anticorp @hemko does she need 400% faster write speed?