PCIe NVMe SSD for ASRock E3C226D2I Build

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omerome

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I currently have an Asrock E3C226D2I motherboard with six (6) 3TB Western Digital Red hard drives. Which means I am using all of the available SATA ports. I have a free PCIe slot and I was wondering instead of using a 16GB USB Flash Drive as my boot drive, can I use an SSD drive in the PCIe slot? And if so, what hard drive would be recommended?

My complete build is as follows:

FreeNAS-11.1-RELEASE
ASRock E3C226D2I Motherboard
16GB (8GB x2) Crucial ECC Memory
Intel Xeon E3-1230 v3 @ 3.30GHz Processor
Fractal Node 304
Seasonic G Series SSR-550RM 550W Power Supply
 

Ericloewe

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Yes.

And if so, what hard drive would be recommended?
Any cheap M.2 PCIe SSD from a reputable manufacturer. You'll also need a PCIe card to M.2 adapter.
 

omerome

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Hi I was wondering if you ever got the M.2 Nvme SSD to work as a boot device. Thanks
I haven't tried it out yet, but I did contact ASRock it.

Here is what they said:
Thank you for your email! I have checked my BIOS archives and documentation of this board, but none of the information indicates if we have ever addressed any setup scenario like this. In this case, I am not 100% in the position to make a statement whether or not the M.2 SSD in the PCIe adapter will make the BIOS recognize it as a boot drive. If you already have the PCIe adapter and the M.2 SSD, you may have to give a try as soon as possible so that you can return these parts if they didn’t work out. However, since you are dealing with the PCIe channel all along, please stick with NVMe M.2 SSD. The drive specs itself should also indicate PCIe form factor. Thank you!

So I am still researching which NVME SSD and adapter to try out.
 

Ericloewe

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It should work.
 

dmitrios

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Found this 3-Port M.2 SSD (NGFF) Adapter Card - 1 x PCIe (NVMe) M.2, 2 x SATA III M.2 - PCIe 3.0
I wonder if using this I would be able to boot from either SATA or NVME SSD (using same board as the OP - E3C226D2I)

Edit: upon re-reading the specs and Amazon reviews it appears that free SATA ports are required to use the M.2 SATA SSD with this card, which defies the purpose, at least for me, as I have no free SATA ports left.
 
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omerome

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I know this thread is old, but I just wanted to give an update, if anyone is curious.

I decided to not use a PCI-E card and instead I got a LSI SAS 9211-8i 8-port 6Gb/s PCI-E Internal HBA and velcro'ed an SSD to the Node 304 case. So now with all six of my hard drives connected to the LSI device, I just plugged in the SSD (Samsung 860 EVO 500GB) to one of the now available SATA ports on the motherboard.

So far, so good.
 
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