I’m planning on giving an older machine a small upgrade with an SSD, but since that machine does not have an m.2 port, I was thinking about buying the cheapest PCIe adapter I could find. Besides the obvious stuff like ports, PCIe gen and lane count, is there anything I should look out for? Specifically regarding Linux?
If you buy one with multiple M.2 slots, then your motherboard need to support lane bifurcation, if it just have one, it should work with no issue, however, I never booted an OS from these things.
Also, why not just a sata ssd if it’s just to revive a PC? It might be cheaper no?
Mainly because I have an m.2 from another machine in the drawer, so the costs are zero.
But from my (admittedly very short) research, the prices are almost the same, regardless of the format.
As long as the system is new enough that the UEFI supports NVMe, it will be able to boot from it. It doesn’t matter whether or not an adapter is used since the adapter is passive.