A new kind of NVME SSD controller has been announced by Phison. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/phison-e8-nvme-ssd-controller,35238.html https://news.xfastest.com/phison/40593/phison-e8-m-2-nvme-ssd-pcie-x2/ This kind of NVME SSD just needs to use 2 lanes of PCI-E. Q1: In the previous discussions saying that UDOO X86 does not support NVME SSDs. is it because the PCI-E channels are just limited to 2 lanes or is it because the Bios does not support NVME protocol? Q2: It is PCI-E 3.0 and UDOO is PCI-E 2.0, is it ok to use a PCI-E 3.0 drive in a PCI-E 2.0 slot? It should be ok as I read from the experience of GPU users, they can plug a 3.0 card to a 2.0 computer. Simply saying, can this new kind of SSD, PCI-E x 2 NVME SSD be used in UDOO x86 right now or by a firmware upgrade in the future? If it is possible by a Bios upgrade, I would encourage the UDOO team to add NVME support to USOO x86 boards as it is so hard to find AHCI M.2 SSDs now in China region, everyone go for NVME and SATA M.2 are so slow for many write-intensive applications. I am building an application that requires fast write time to SSD so I want to get rid of the SATA protocol.
Q2, is it ok to use a PCI-E 3.0 drive in a PCI-E 2.0 slot? Ans: yes. It's just run slower. Back to your main question... From the linked article, it appears to be a key-B+M M.2 card thus it will fit UDOO x86's top slot (Key-B, the gen 2 NGFF slot.) On the other hand, you won't be able to boot from it since there is no BIOS/UEFI support (to recognize, initialize, and boot from it), on NVMe device at all. Note that such PCIex2 NVMe SSD is so special and unique, it enters into a niche market. (It may have some kind of late boot, OS level special driver to get it recognized. But it will be D: drive...) ATOM versions later than Braswell (where UDOO x86 is based on), such as Apollo Lake and Gemini Lake, do have 2 more PCIe lanes (changed from 4 to 6) thus would be more suitable for gen 3 M.2 slot (i,e., key-M slot, say, for a real NVMe PCIex4 SSD) type of system board design. <-- just an opportunity, not necessarily a mandatory design A side topic is the myth about NVMe will always be faster than SATA III (6 Gbps) SSD ... Multiple factors to consider from: actual NAND memory speed, NVMe's in-build PCIe-memory controller performance, CPU SoC PCIe lane optimization (or congestion), etc. Remember the backdrop that this part of universe is the $ ATOM class, designed not to be competing with Intel main stream $$$ Core processors. ccs_hello
Thanks for your reply~ Running on D: is not a problem for me as I do not intend to boot from it. I just want to know if this NVME SSD will get recognized by the UDOO X86 board or not~ ^_^ For the NVME myth, I agree that a NVME SSD does not mean that it must be faster than SATA III. But at least I have never seen any NVME SSD that performs slower than 600MByte/s in Read ^_^, usually it will be faster than 1000MB read and 700MB write. SATA III just have 6Gbits / s bus speed, the throughput will never be faster than 750MByte/s theoretical value, for practical use with overhead, throughput of SATA III never get better than 600MByte/s.
Please note you'll be the first person to test out such 2-lane NV<e configuration, and possibly not even supported by UEFI (thus not bootable.) One the other hand, there is a hope the NVMe driver is built-in (in Windows 10 kernel) such that it might be recognized after system comes up. I really suggest you contact that "special" x2 NVMe SSD vendor (mentioning that the motherboard does not have NVMe support, I doubt UDOO x86 has it.) I think that vendor had foreseen such situation happens often. Again, 2-lane NMVe key-B is so special, it's really YMMV. P.S. see the normal x4 NVMe case, and BIOS settings... https://tinkertry.com/how-to-boot-win10-from-samsung-950-pro-nvme-on-superserver
Thanks a lot ccs_hello I'll see if I can buy one NVMe with X2 or X4 and use it as data disk and report here ^_^ [ QUOTE="Rex Sham, post: 34004, member: 46769"]Thanks for your reply~ Running on D: is not a problem for me as I do not intend to boot from it. I just want to know if this NVME SSD will get recognized by the UDOO X86 board or not~ ^_^[/QUOTE]
NO. Not the regular NVMe SSD. That's the standard, ordinary x4 card which is a key-M card which needs 4-lane PCIe and won't fit UDOO x86's upper slot.
