Hi,
I have a fairly straightforward question but that doesn't necessarily mean a straight-forward answer! The short question is will my MB support booting from a PCIe to SATA 3.0 expansion card?
The detail follows...
I have a GA-H55M-UD2H motherboard (F11 BIOS), i3 processor, 4GB RAM and a 60GB Kingston SSD. However OS space was getting tight so I've ordered a SanDisk Ultra II 120GB SSD which, of course, is SATA 3.0 with theoretical maximum speeds of 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write.
As the SATA ports on the MB are SATA 2.0 (3Gb/s) they are restricted to 250MB/s throughput. I researched a little and found that some people had used a PCIe to SATA 3.0 expansion card to squeeze a bit more out of their MBs. The GA-H55M-UD2H manual specifies that the GPU PCIe slot conforms to PCIe 2.0 and therefore has a theoretical maximum speed of 500MB/s each way. The BIOS also presents a HDD boot priority menu that lists 'bootable add-in cards'. However I haven't found any more information, e.g. about compatibility. The following card is only £8 so I thought it was worth a punt:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00L22W51CNow the card has arrived, the SSD is still to be delivered but I thought I'd test the functionality with my existing SSD. I installed the card and installed the drivers in Windows so it appears to work as an expansion card (I don't have a spare SATA drive to test this). However when I reattached the system SSD SATA cable to the card and booted (with 'bootable add-in cards' selected first in the HDD boot priority menu) I got a no system disk error. The Windows install disk doesn't see the SSD either so I'm guessing it just isn't being picked up? Is there anything else I can try or is this just not going to work?