This is probably a very stupid question so apologies! I built my computer years ago and now things are finally starting to fall apart and so I'm looking to upgrade bits on a piecemeal basis. The first thing on my hit list is to get an SSD. I have an old mobo (ASUS P5K) and wanted to know whether a new M.2 SSD would work until I upgrade my mobo in the future? I have read that they are backwards compatible but wanted to check that it will actually work (I know I will get nowhere near the performance that it can deliver, but would like to future proof myself!) Thanks all, James
Yes, assuming you get a PCI-e to M.2 adapter card, it should work. Just make sure you get a M.2 SSD that actually uses the PCIe bus (some appear to use SATA, which I don't think would work).
Right, whilst it 'should' work as a storage drive with Win 8.1 or 10 (Win7 isn't properly supported & you'd need in install drivers), it's *very* unlikely that you would be able to boot from it - as the Z97 & X99 boards had to have an update to enable consistent & reliable booting. Now that's not to say that some odd earlier boards didn't work with some major faffing with settings &/or inserting the nvme orom into the bios - but i am 99.999% confident that you'll have no joy whatsoever. if you want to try creating a custom bios then it's discussed on - http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2437588 - but i honestly believe that it'd be a complete waste of time
I would opt for a standard SATA SSD (ACHI) drive. A P5K will probably support some form of PCI-E-based storage, but certainly not recent NVMe. Drag the motherboard and CPU up first, then add-on from there.
Thanks for the responses all. I would be looking to use it to boot from with Windows 10 so probably not a good option then. I just wanted to future proof myself a little until I can buy the rest. New mobo = new processor + RAM which can add up! Guess I'll just grab myself a good cheap SATA SSD for now!
