Can I use the M.2 SSD under Windows 7 without any restrictions?

[booya]

Now I have several SSD drives with SATA interface, but I need one M.2, which will have 2 main partitions. The active partition will be bootable (the system will be restored to it). I don't want to install any drivers

Or can I somehow do without NVMe to make this drive work in PCIe mode or else? If I'm not mistaken, it's possible to change the operating mode in BIOS. If so, will I lose anything in terms of performance?

I have never used such drives before... To be honest, I don’t really want to. But the system should be a little more responsive I hope.

I'm tired of waiting for 2-3 seconds until the email client or browser opens

[BigJohnny]

Does board support M2 is first question and second is can you find windows 7 drivers for it. They were not native until 8.1.
If you can get it to work they are much faster, but I think the win 7 is going to be your stumbling block.

[Ch3vr0n]

If you don't want to install any drivers, then don't even begin using them. While the default drivers that come with windows (but as BigJohnny sais, they weren't native in windows 7 as M.2 didn't even exist yet), but they're not ideal. Manufacturer issued drivers are optimized for the drives and will always outperform the stock windows drivers.

Now, assuming the model you're thinking about has windows 7 drivers (we have to assume here, since you don't mention your motherboard nor the drives you plan on using), you shouldn't need to mess in the bios and change things. Most motherboards default at least 1 M.2 slot to PCIEx4 (max speed), the impact that has (disabling sata ports or not) depends on the board model.

Then there's the whole speed issue. A non-expensive drive like the intel 660/665p has about triple the speed read spead of a standard sata drive (13-1500MB read and around 1000-1200 write, depending on the model size you pick. The bigger the drive, the faster it will be). Which at best will cut the "load time" to about 2 seconds, which i doubt)

For example, my Superfast, expensive M.2 boot drive (Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1TB) has a Read/Write speed of 3550 MB/sec | 3200MB/sec write, costs around 2-250$ depending where you get it. and outlook STILL LOADS IN 3 seconds. Are you willing to spend that cash for a load speed you may not even see/get?

[davemon50]

Why must it be W7? Is it for work and you cannot upgrade? I have a very old laptop I use to let the kids do some basic gaming and school work, and it runs fine under W10-Home. If I could actually install an M.2 in it I would, but alas it's too old. But it does run W10. MS does not support W7 any more, but they may have put out an M.2 driver before they abandoned support, I wonder if you have looked for such an animal yet. In the end I agree with above, the mfg driver would be better anyway.

[booya]

Does board support M2 is first question and second is can you find windows 7 drivers for it. They were not native until 8.1. If you can get it to work they are much faster, but I think the win 7 is going to be your stumbling block.

My MB is MAXIMUS X HERO. I understand correctly that I can make the M.2 drive work as a simple PCIe, so that the OS detects it without any additional drivers? Even so, will it be significantly faster on a random read operations than any SATA SSD?

Then there's the whole speed issue. A non-expensive drive like the intel 660/665p has about triple the speed read spead of a standard sata drive (13-1500MB read and around 1000-1200 write, depending on the model size you pick. The bigger the drive, the faster it will be). Which at best will cut the "load time" to about 2 seconds, which i doubt).

I aimed at 1 TB 970 Pro. Will make two primary partitions on it - 1 for the system (100 GB) and the rest for games. As a result, I can remove 3 SATA SSDs from my PC.

Why must it be W7? Is it for work and you cannot upgrade?

I would not want to upgrade Win 7 to Win 10. Only install from scratch. No one will give a 100% guarantee that there will be no problem during the upgrade. Therefore, only installation from scratch is permissible. But then I have to install many programs and configure them. It will take a lot of time and possibly nerves. The last time I reinstalled the OS on my PC 6 years ago. Sooner or later it will have to be done, but for now I would like to postpone it for some time.

[Ch3vr0n]

It makes zero sense going for such a high end samsung ssd and then not using the finetuned specialised samsung nvme drivers.

As far as the upgrade goes. You do know you can get a free windows 10 license that way do you? Cause that's what i did a few years ago. I had no plans on running an "upgraded" system either. I simply upgraded to get my free license key and when the system was tagged as "activated", i simply reinstalled windows from scratch (deleted partitions etc). When windows was back installed, i had a fresh install of windows 10 and a free legitimate activation.

[BigJohnny]

^^^
What he said.
I did the free upgrade on one machine long ago and ended up going back and doing a clean install anyway as I dont care what you do that jump is just too much.
Sounds like your board will support it just fine, its the win7 thats gonna kill you. A lot of people are hung up on Win7 and just refuse but bottom line is no one makes drivers for it anymore and even MS has ditched support.

If you want to wait to install new OS then wait to buy drive that current OS wont support. Price will come down or someting new and better will come out, depends on how long you wait. Ive done 4 clean installs in the last week on new platform. Is it a PITA, yes. Just save your files to an external drive, gather up your list of software codes and install files and save them all. Mine all reside on a NAS so all I have to do is reinstall from there. Takes a few hours but every now and then a clean start just makes things work better and gets rid of old refuse and unused registry entries and orphaned DLLs.