Unscrewing the side-panel screw The inside of the case The adaptor card inserted into my GPU cage. Note that you’ll need to insert your NVME SSD into the card first. The process varies depending on your case, but it’s usually as simple as taking the side panel off your case, removing a blanking plate, and then inserting and screwing the card in. I don’t have detailed steps for your system, but I can show you how it worked on mine. Installing the adaptor is usually pretty easy. In the end, I went for this one because it was cheap and it looked like I could boot from it – some other adaptors have caused problems with this. In order to connect an M.2 drive to a PCIe slot, there are various adaptors available. If you’re using a standard ATX motherboard, you may well have multiple PCIe slots, but in my case I had to ditch the graphics card, which was an acceptable compromise for me because I wasn’t using it anyway. Fortunately, any recent desktop will use PCIe for the graphics card, and my old PC was no exception. I was really interested in the PCI Express/PCIe drives. So first I should point out that some M.2 drives actually use SATA, but I wasn’t interested in those as I could just connect a SATA SSD. You’ll see reference to rEFInd in the comments, but this is because I somehow got confused and thought I was using rEFInd instead of Clover. Similar steps can be followed for rEFInd, but that will only boot EFI/UEFI-based systems, whereas Clover can boot both BIOS and EFI/UEFI systems. This will work for booting both Windows and Linux, on systems with either BIOS or EFI/UEFI firmware. Fortunately, there is a way to get these super-fast storage devices working on older desktop PCs (unfortunately this won’t work on laptops). The old PC (an Alienware X51 R2) didn’t have a M.2 slot to accommodate an NVME drive, which is common on systems of that age (circa late 2013). NVME SSDs were quite cheap at the time, so I got myself a second hand 500GB Samsung OEM one commonly found in laptops. Back in October when I set up my new Ryzen PC, I thought it might be good to get an NVME SSD for the older desktop as well – I’d pinched all the drives from it for the new PC, and I didn’t want to be stuck using my old, slow HDD.
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