Z77 Extreme 4 NVME PCI-E SSD BOOTING!

I am a little late to the forum but I am very interested in getting this NVMe to boot. Or be usable.

So, I am now aware that it is very possible to get my Z77 Extreme4 board to recognize and boot to the NVMe drive via PCIe. I have a couple small questions, and hope that someone is still reading to answer.

I want to know what actual adapter was successful. I have a dedicated video card already installed on x16, but I understand that the x8 could still be a viable option, I just don't want to take away from the x16 lanes. I see some folks have had success with the x4 but before I do that I just wanted to know if that acceptable.

So, what adapter and what slot would be best.

Also I read the entire forum, did you all use a modified bios or was the most recent AsRock bios NVMe ready? Even though I read it this question stuck in my brain.

....thank you in advance.

Let me just start by saying this was NOT easy. Probably b/c I'm a newb at all this but I was finally able to piece together all of the random bits of information from everyone's posts and things that I googled online and able to boot the NVME from my Asrock Z77. In reality, I could have saved myself 1 week by spending an extra $100 to get a new MOBO with full NVME performance and a lot of headache but finally there! Just tested and the performance is awesome!

Everyone has done this with EVO disk but just getting it out there that I was able to do this with my WD-Black. I cloned using Macrium as stated by someone else, flashed with 2.9p. Did diskpart and bcdboot also. It's highly advised by just about everyone to remove your old drive and only have your new one in to bcdboot but I wasn't able to get system recovery from USB to boot so I had to do bcdboot with my old drive connected. Just be careful. Anyways, it worked! FINALLY!

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
                          Crystal Dew World : https://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

   Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 3016.974 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2543.630 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 1078.708 MB/s [ 263356.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) :   756.081 MB/s [ 184590.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   298.825 MB/s [ 72955.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) :   207.594 MB/s [ 50682.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :    36.518 MB/s [   8915.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) :   136.393 MB/s [ 33299.1 IOPS]

Test : 50 MiB [C: 47.4% (220.7/465.2 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2019/10/14 21:47:30
    OS : Windows 10 [10.0 Build 18362] (x64)

So I am very happy with the outcome so far.

I used a pci express from amazon(20$ us) by the namebrand of yateng. It supports both b&m and m style drives.

So, it was super simple. The flash to the version that supports nvme, installed the drive with adapter, booted and enabled the drive, created media with uefi. Forgot to enable the CSM support first go around...enabled and viola.

It worked. Installed 1903 in about 11 minutes.

My boot time went from 40 seconds to about 11. My average speeds for reading are 3100-3200. They were 550-600.

Very happy so far. Very.

Thanks to everyone who put in the work figuring this out.

Hi guys,

Where do you guys find the CSM for z77 Extreme4? I have installed 2.90P first and didn't see it in the Boot settings at the bottom. Then I installed the 2.90Q and also cannot find it.

I didn't have any issues flashing the Bios as later the Bios version says 2.90Q. Im confused why I can't see the CSM option in my Bios.

Should I be concerned? I am about to install my M2. SSD + PCIe adapter this week.

Turns out the drive was DOA. HP EX950 M.2 2280 2TB PCle Gen3 x4, NVMe1.3 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) 5MS24AA#ABC. I purchase it at Newegg. We'll see how fast they can turn it around.