My old sandisk SATA ssd was starting to get really slow for some reason. The SMART data and the sandisk SSD dashboard app were saying the SSD was healthy, but its performance wasn’t anywhere near what it was when brand new.
When benchmarked, it was all over the place with looong access times:
Sooo I decided to take the opportunity to upgrade the SSD to something faster - ended up grabbing a Transcend 512GB drive, with onboard DRAM
There were two problems though:
- My motherboard doesn’t support NVMe (at least officially)
- My only available PCIe slot is an x1/single lane
After researching, I realised that the single PCIe lane would still give me almost 1GB/s in real world usage - even though its far from the 3GB/s the drive is rated for, it’s double the speed of SATA and it’s worlds apart from my Sandisk ssd lol.
Ordered an NVMe to PCIe adapter, and proceeded to chop up my PCIe slot to make it fit:
PCMR NSFW
It took a while since I don’t own a dremel 🤪
Once that was done, I kapton taped up the exposed metal bits on the NVMe adapter, that could short on a mobo heatsink nearby.
In it goes!! (The GPU went in after the pic lol)
After re running the benchmarks, OMG the speed difference is insane, although it’s limited by that single PCIe lane.
I was caught off guard by something else though. After cloning my existing install to the new NVMe SSD, it booted right up, with the original Sandisk drive gone. My BIOS does not even recognise the NVMe drive as a disk drive, and there are no settings anywhere in there for it.
BIOS person, thank you whoever you are, you saved me needing to do more jank to get my unsupported NVMe drive working!
I am more than happy so far with the dramatic speed increase compared to the SATA drive. I can now actually shut down my desktop when I’m not using it 🥲
TIL you can install PCI cards by just…taping up extraneous pins??? And they work that way??? Cooooool.
PCIe is extremely flexible. Often times those big 16x slots are actually only wired for 8x or even 4x. The device has to be able to support running on fewer lanes than expected because of stuff like this.
Well, its basically running at PCIe 1x. Thats why theres all those notches on the full 16x card. You can install in a 1x, 2x, or 4x header, and it will work. Problem is some cards dont have the notches and need the full connector, but supposedly you can grind off some plastic from the port to make it fit and it will still work.
You don’t even need to tape them up. The slot is open ended explicitly for this kind of situation. The extra contacts just dangle and have no power running through them since they aren’t connected.
Also this is PCIe, not PCI. It’s just got a few gaps because it’s actually only x4, and the other pins are just there for stability.
Cutting the back of x4/x8 slots is pretty common. Some motherboards even have open back slots as default.
Great work, OP. A very nice and well thought out upgrade (most folk skip the kapton tape).It’s worth everyone knowing that pcie slots are generally universally compatible. So a GPU (wanting 16x slot) can run in a 1x physical slot (infact this is how GPU mining expansion rigs work).
I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a pcie card that will not function at all unless it receives it’s required lanes.I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a pcie card that will not function at all unless it receives it’s required lanes
One of the few things that’d be problematic would be the x16 -> quad M.2 cards which use PCIe bifurcation.
Lanes 1-4 from the socket are wired to the first M.2, 5-8 to the 2nd, etc.It would still work (by some definition of the word), but in the sense that the first M.2 drive would get 1 lane and any others wouldn’t be connected.
(Quad M.2 boards with a “PLX” or other PCIe switch chip would work fine with 1 upstream lane serving all 4 drives)
the fact that it fires up without BIOS recognition is cool and weird… that moment it boots after that kind of migration upgrade is like nothing else…
and i gotta say awesome mod dude… that was one cool ass solution with available hardware…
If you put your bootloader with nvme support on a recognized drive it works.
thank you that makes perfect sense, and is pretty slick
Too bad we don’t have a similar community to TechSupportMcGyver
This is some bde hacktastic shit and I’m all here for it.
Great job.
…so that’s what the PCIe x1 slot for, huh?
Ive got a few 1x cards. For example, my old home server box has a 1x slot that you can plug in a 1x gpu, or additional networking card, USB, etc.
Lol. You can shove all sorts of crap in those.
Love seeing a dodgy project come together and deliver real world results 💪
So long as it’s working that’s all these matters
Nice job! This is the type of stuff I come here for.
That’s a really neat upgrade :) props. I’m guessing you have some additional drives with the bootloader on them. While the bios may not support nvme as a boot device, as long as the boot loader is on a supported drive and supports nvme drives it can boot the nvme drive. Had to do this once with a flash drive.
Had the being slow issue as well with my sandisk. Close enough before failure it seems.
But I had a backup!
I had a (slightly old) image backup just in case, thankfully didn’t need to use it though!
Props to you, awesome job.
