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U.2 to M.2 storage - how to get it to work.

KnightOfNi
Level 7
Hi, just putting this up. I was going to upgrade my whole machine but with prices what they are....

This is for all you Impact VIII people out there.

I wanted to replace my secondary as I'm happy with my SATA SSD to boot from and I keep my office software on it, games on a secondary. I found a way of getting the U.2 port on a VIII impact to work for NvME. I looked here before buying and there was a lot of requests for information but not a lot of information to go on.

So, first, I flashed the BIOS to 3801 and updated all my drivers. Personally, I'd recommend Driver Easy Pro, makes it so simple.

Anyway here goes (my choices included):
A u.2 to m.2 adapter cable: LINKUP - Internal 12G U.2 Cable (85Ω 85 ohm PCIe Gen 4 Mini SAS HD to U.2 / SFF-8643 to SFF-8639 Cable) with SATA Power
A 2.5'' caddy for the m.2 card: ICY BOX M.2 to U.2 Adapter 2.5" Format for M.2 NVMe SSD PCIe 4.0 x4 Standard Cooling Fins. Nice case, with a thermal pad for the card and aluminium caddy to dissipate heat.
And PCIe memory: Sabrent Rocket Q 1TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 (SB-RKTQ-1TB) - chosen for cooler running, my mini-ITX case is a bit tight for airflow.

First, format the card, I had a USB PCIe adapter already to hand. It just made it easier to 'see' the card prior to cloning and testing everything was okay.
Alternatively, you can assemble this lot and do it from Win10.
Power off... switch off the PSU.
Hooking up the cable into the U.2 socket, then plug other end into the caddy and the cable's SATA connector into a spare SATA power socket. Fix the Caddy down.
Boot.
Use the Acronis software to clone the disk you want. Very easy to do. This includes cloning the boot drive.
Reboot and go to BIOS.
The drive should show up in PCH storage. There are no settings for the U.2 configuration, it just works.
The machine should now boot.

If you are cloning the boot drive, you need to remove the old boot drive first, then BIOS check and boot off the new drive.

So far, after two weeks, it works well. It's very fast and close (about 95%) to the NVME throughput specs for the card. Personally, I didn't go for faster NVME, just something trusted, and fast enough. Price v performance kind of thing. Doing large downloads (>40Gb) it does get warm but I'm getting max throughput (writing as fast as I can download, showing 70Mbps in 'Network' on task manager.)

Loading things - quick... very quick.

Well, hope this helps for any Impact VIII people.
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