I’m planning on giving an older machine a small upgrade with an SSD, but since that machine does not have an m.2 port, I was thinking about buying the cheapest PCIe adapter I could find. Besides the obvious stuff like ports, PCIe gen and lane count, is there anything I should look out for? Specifically regarding Linux?
They’re some boot issues using the adapter. I had some difficulty getting the BIOS to identify the adapter as a bootable HDD. Unfortunately I don’t remember how I solved it, but it was solvable. But you asked for potential pitfalls, so there’s one. Heat is also another issue. You don’t need to pay 200% more to get a NVMe drive with a heatsink already installed, you can just buy a normal NVMe and slap a $5 heatsink from Amazon onto it. I did that and it worked well.
Unless your buying a superspeed pci-e gen 4 drive you really don’t even need a heatsink for most drives.
Haha) me trying to fit pcie gen 4 ssd into pcie gen 1 motherboard)