M.2 SSD on old X58 system with M.2 PCI adaptor. Can it work?

[Greendale_Ghost]

Hi, just putting feeler out in case there is anyone still here! I have a gigabyte x-58 i7 system which was a successful hackintosh build for 9 years before I stupidly filled up the boot SSD and killed it.
seeing this thread has me interested in rebirthing the machine as a dual
Boot windows / Mac OS with clover via m2 on a pci card! Looking for advice on the best choice for pci card?

also - does anyone know how far it’s possible to go with a GPU on these old boards?


The motherboard is Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R Rev 2, Intel X58, S1366, SLi/Xfire PCI-E 2, DDR3 2200,

Graphics card (x2) are 1GB Sapphire HD 5770 Vapor-X, PCI-E 2.1 (x16), 4800MHz GDDR5, GPU 860 MHz,

Processor is Intel Core i7 950 Bloomfield 45nm, 3.06 GHz, QPI 4.8GT/s, 8MB Cache, 23x Ratio,

 

[PPCnostalgic]

Good morning. I tried 2 or 3 PCIe M2 adapters (very cheap from China) and all of them worked flawlessy.
My (very) old X58 Xeon W3690 now boots Mac OS Mojave from a Raid Zero on 2 x Samsung SM951 AHCI via Clover and still runs like a Red Bull.
As for the video card this one is equipped with an AMD RX 570 Nitro+ 4Gb and Mac OS fully supports it with native drivers.
Rob

 

[Greendale_Ghost]

Good morning. I tried 2 or 3 PCIe M2 adapters (very cheap from China) and all of them worked flawlessy.
My (very) old X58 Xeon W3690 now boots Mac OS Mojave from a Raid Zero on 2 x Samsung SM951 AHCI via Clover and still runs like a Red Bull.
As for the video card this one is equipped with an AMD RX 570 Nitro+ 4Gb and Mac OS fully supports it with native drivers.
Rob

Hi Rob, thanks for coming back to me, great to hear your system is working fine. Is there an upper palikir for the m2 speeds via pci2? - wondering if it’s worth getting a super fast wester digital m2 (7000mbps read)!

 

[Regeneration]

You can use M.2 and even NVMe without a bootloader:

2022-X58/1366 PIN Motherboards NVME M.2 SSD BIOS MOD Collection

I should immediately point out that the NVMe SSD BIOS_MOD Files are Updated as "pure Bios Files" without the Need for Additional Hardware and Software such as DUET, Clover and REFIND. No Additional Hardware or Software is required. All you need to do is to update the motherboard bios again and...

www.techpowerup.com

 

[Greendale_Ghost]

Oh wow that’s some good advice! Saved me a lot of headache, thank you!

 

[PPCnostalgic]

Hi Rob, thanks for coming back to me, great to hear your system is working fine. Is there an upper palikir for the m2 speeds via pci2? - wondering if it’s worth getting a super fast wester digital m2 (7000mbps read)!

I think if you go with 1 M2 disk only you won't get all the speed WD M2 is capable because of the PCIe 2nd generation limit. My write speed is about 2350 Mb/s and read speed 2650 Mb/s just because of the Raid Zero configuration with 2 M2 disks.

 

[chrcoluk]

I think its a try it and see, bios needs NVME support. Some boards without M.2 slots do have support as the earliest NVME drives were PCIE slot variants.