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GA-EP45T-UD3R. Does it boot from a PCI-E SATA Controller?

Takis_M

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GA-EP45T-UD3R. Does it boot from a PCI-E SATA Controller?
« on: November 18, 2017, 08:35:32 am »
Good day to the community

I have a Gigabyte GA-EP45T-UD3R motherboard, S.N: SN084100050561, paired with an Intel C2Q Q9550 CPU, 4 x Corsair CMX8GX3M2A1600C9, 4GB DIMMs, a SAPPHIRE NITRO Radeon RX 460 4G D5 OC GPU and a Western Digital WDS250G1B0A-00H9H0, 250GB SATA 3 SSD, as the system disk.

I am going to build a new PC with this hardware, under Windows 10 Pro 64-bit Operating System.

I need to know if I can use an add-on PCI-E SATA 3 Controller Card and have the Western Digital SSD connected to it, allowing the motherboard to boot from this Controller and SSD. I am thinking to  do this, in order to benefit from the faster SATA 3 protocol, instead of using the motherboard SATA 2 connections.

I tried to find if there is such a possibility, by reading the motherboard manual, but I could not locate it. The relevant section in the manual (Advanced BIOS Features - First/Second/Third Boot Device) specifies that the boot order can be done from the following available devices:
- Floppy
- LS120
- Hard Disk
- CDROM
- ZIP
- USB-FDD
- USB-ZIP
- USB-CDROM
- USB-HDD
- Legacy LAN
or to be Disabled.

From above, it is not clear if the motherboard can boot from a PCI-E Controller with an SSD attached to it.

Can someone clarify this for me, please?

Thanks in advance.

shadowsports

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Re: GA-EP45T-UD3R. Does it boot from a PCI-E SATA Controller?
« Reply #1 on: November 18, 2017, 02:47:17 pm »
Greetings,
The chances of your board supporting boot from for a PCI-e add-on card is low or non-existent.  Its 9 yrs old.  I doubt any BIOS rev would allow you to do this. 
Z390 AORUS PRO (F10) \850w, 9900K, 32GB GSkill TriZ RGB - 16-18-18-38, RTX 3080Ti FTW3 Ultra, 960 Pro_m.2, W11
Z370-HD3P (F5) \750w, 8350K, 8GB LPX 3200 - 16-18-18-38, GTX 970 FTW SC, Intel SSD, 2TB RAID1, W11
Z97X-UD5H \850w, 4790K, 32GB Vengeance, RTX 2080 FTW