Acer Aspire T / AT3-605-ES20;

OLAVK

Shortly after purchasing this desktop, my Seagate 2TB HDD failed.  Since I had a laptop, I put the desktop aside; and only now I am looking to bring it back to life.  As it needs a new drive, I am looking to add a Samsung V-NAND SSD 980 EVO Plus as the bootup drive.  As there is no m.2 socket, I will need to use the PCIE socket.  There seems to be 3 of them PCIE-1x1, PCIE-1x2 and PCIE-16x1.  I will also need to purchase an m.2 adapter to put the SSD into and then the adapter into the PCIE socket.

Does anyone know what compliant level these PCIE's are, AND if this PC is capable of having an this Samsung m.2 SSD as it's bootup drive ?

billsey

The problem you are likely to run into is that most PCI Express cards do not support booting from them. You can work around it by putting a small SATA SSD in for the boot partitions and use the M.2 card to hold Windows and user data. You basically have to start with a functioning drive, clone the small partitions to your new boot drive, then clone only the C drive to the M.2.

OLAVK

I have the M.2 PCIE installed.  Since I don't actually have a HDD installed, but I did manage to get the command prompt through the use of a Win 10 recovery DVD.  The m.2 SSD is not being noticed, nor is it noticed in the PC setup (f12) ?

billsey

Did the PCIe card come with drivers or a link to download drivers? When you boot from the install image you might be able to load the drivers to get access to the M.2 drive. If not or if the driver can't be loaded that early then the card is likely not bootable.