Using NVME drives on old desktop computers.
This is a work in progress and lacks polish, but will give users a way to test the concept.
This topic is a record from research and test done on both MBR and UEFI computers. It can be applied to systems ranging from Pentium single core to Multicore computers. It primarily adds fast storage and/or fast booting to computers where the NVME is not recognized as a boot device in bios.
There is a large body of information on the internet, much of it for users of "Hackintosh" (MacOS on Intel PC), some on Linux and of course none on Puppy.
My conclusion, after doing the testing, is most users will do better just using a SATA SSD to gain a speed increase, since they require no special tweaking. As of this writing there is no real cost difference and the NVME speed advantage, particularly for Puppy, is measured in seconds.
If you are still interested, read on, the "Use" cases will be in multiple post.
Why do it?
1. Speed, NVME drives are 2-3 times faster than SATA SSD and 10-12 times faster than a HDD.
2. Space, maybe your computer doesn't have room for an extra internal drive.
3. You just want to see if it will work (that would be me).
Hardware requirements:
-Motherboard (Intel 64bit CPU) with an available PCIe slot, and that can boot from USB
-NVME M.2, PCIe, M-key drive
-NVME M-key to PCIe adapter
Mine was purchased on Ebay (about $2 US) described as: 1*NVMe M.2 NGFF SSD to PCI-E PCI express 3.0 16x x4 adapter riser card conH4
Only tested with 64bit OS's.
For reference, my test NVME is a 256gb setup as follows:
Partiton table = GPT
-Partition1 = 100mb, fat32, ESP. set boot flag for grub2
-Partition2 = 50gb, ntfs, for win11
-Partition3 = 20gb, ext3 for BW64, F95, and MX-Linux frugal install
Here is my NVME grub.cfg for a example:
Use cases:
-Storage Only (post #2)
-Puppy only booting (post #3)
-Multi-boot on MBR computers (post #4)
-Multi-boot on UEFI computers (post #5)
wizard