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Selectively enable/disable M.2 drives in the BIOS

Selectively enable/disable M.2 drives in the BIOS
« on: September 13, 2018, 07:41:30 am »
I'm considering building a system comprising either an AMD 2950X  or Intel 9900K cpu.
My current system allows me to set up profiles in the BIOS which include allowing me to selectively disable/enable various SATA storage and boot drives. I'm a developer and have set up various boot drive options incorporating customised installations whereby I can boot into any of these drives and have the other boot drives hidden from the system - it's important that, in the different boot configurations, Windows cannot see the disable drives. This has worked very well for some time. For the new build, I'm now looking at using 2-3 (or more) M.2 (PCIe x4) drives as various boot/storage drives but unfortunately my existing motherboard has not similar enable/disable facility for any M.2 option. 
So my question is: do Gigabyte have any motherboards that would do this for any of these two processors - selectively enable/disable them in the BIOS?

shadowsports

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Re: Selectively enable/disable M.2 drives in the BIOS
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2018, 02:44:07 pm »
Greetings,
Selective enable/disable  - Neither platform "officially supports" this function.  In fact, I'm not aware of ANY manufacturer that officially supports this.  People have been doing this for years, but its not best practice or a recommended configuration.  Trusting your BIOS as a Boot Manager works for a while, until it doesn't.  But you cannot hide or unhide disks.

I would suggest HyperV, VMWare or that you purchase a NAS which is capable or running VM's.  This gives you reliable system state, back up and is 100% supported. 
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Re: Selectively enable/disable M.2 drives in the BIOS
« Reply #2 on: September 13, 2018, 05:25:15 pm »
Thanks for your reply.
I did try out a VM solution a few years ago but ran into issues accessing dedicated hardware e.g. nvidia gfx card (essential requirement) and there were also some latency issues. All this is bypassed using BIOS profiles though I do understand the (temporary) corruption risk and I am making an assumption that each BIOS option always does what it says on the tin...no less an assumption than any user,  VM user or not.
If VM options have improved does anyone know of any that allow hardware pass through e.g. nvidia gfx card?
« Last Edit: September 13, 2018, 05:27:01 pm by mesab100g »

shadowsports

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Re: Selectively enable/disable M.2 drives in the BIOS
« Reply #3 on: September 14, 2018, 05:15:08 am »
Thanks for your reply.
I did try out a VM solution a few years ago but ran into issues accessing dedicated hardware e.g. nvidia gfx card (essential requirement) and there were also some latency issues. All this is bypassed using BIOS profiles though I do understand the (temporary) corruption risk and I am making an assumption that each BIOS option always does what it says on the tin...no less an assumption than any user,  VM user or not.
If VM options have improved does anyone know of any that allow hardware pass through e.g. nvidia gfx card?

Pretty sure both VMWare and HyperV support dedicated GPUs now.  As for which, you'd have to research based on the platform and OS. 
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

Re: Selectively enable/disable M.2 drives in the BIOS
« Reply #4 on: September 14, 2018, 07:33:11 am »
Appreciate the heads-up, will have a look into this.