Does my Gigabyte H61M-DS2 DVI (Intel H61 Chipset) motherboard support NVMe SSD drives?

I am a newbie here (so please take it easy on me!)

Can anyone help with my questions - Does my Gigabyte H61M-DS2 DVI (Intel H61 Chipset) motherboard support NVMe SSD drives?

Solution 1:

'Yes' and no.

You don't have 'native' NVMe slots - as Harry's answer has alluded to but that doesn't mean you can't plug in and use an NVMe drive on a PC without those sockets, or with insufficient PCIe sockets.

In your case - if you have spare PCIe sockets, you can use an adaptor like the one below to plug in an NVMe drive into an X4 (or better) PCIe socket. I would suggest one that's not sharing lanes with your video card. These are labeled as M.2 NVMe to PCIe x16 adaptors and I have one here with the x8 and x16 pins snapped off. The adaptors are under a fiver from say AliExpress

As for the 'no' You can't boot off it - the PCs of the era probably didn't 'know' fast PCIe storage existed, and bios wouldn't be able to initiate it. It didn't even turn up on the system I tested it on in the bios as a drive. Your bootloader would likely need to be on a SATA drive of some sort.

You can however use it as a fast storage drive on a PC of that era - I tested mine on windows 10 on a roughly contemporary machine with no real issues. In theory, while it's a whole another question - if you could keep the bootloader on another drive you could boot an OS that's hosted on it. Another alternative (and that's something I came across