X10SRi-F and NVMe Boot Possible?

Hi guys, I am not very familiar with how NVMe is handled for booting, but I just ordered a X10SRi-F for a homelab upgrade and figured if I can get a PCIe card to slot a NVMe SSD into, I’d prefer this for my proxmox host and it’s VM’s over a SATA ssd.

That said, I don’t fully understand how to determine if it can actually boot from this device. I do build desktops, have for 15+ years, but I’ll be honest I have been slightly confused by NVMe and it’s comparability since it’s release many years ago. The X10SRi-F has UEFI, but I am not certain if it has whatever is required to boot from a PCIe NVMe device, and looking at the manual and poking around forum threads has not really helped my understand. I did come across some posts about “making any mobo including legacy bios boards boot from NVMe with clover bootloader” etc, but as a server I more want to just “be stable and work”, I am not sure this route is right for me, nor is editing the BIOS imo which is another option I found.

Does anyone know if this board will natively boot from NVMe on a PCIe add on riser card?

I had an X10SRA-F, so not exactly the same board but pretty damn close - it did NVME booting just fine, but only after the BIOS was flashed to revision 2.0c. Processor was a Xeon E5-2676 v3. You won’t need to do anything fancy - if it’s supported, it will show up right in your boot devices list and that’s it (edit, like gordon just mentioned, after you have a UEFI boot partition on it/have installed the OS).

I’ll let someone else confirm, but I suspect that worst case, you need a BIOS update. Best case, it works out of the box.

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Yes, but you won’t see the boot option until after you install a UEFI OS. I have the x10dri, so the dualie version of what you got.

I was concerned at first since I didn’t see a way to designate an NVME drive as the boot target. Once I installed Fedora on it, and rebooted there it was! I imagine it’s similar for other OS.

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Oh, if you’re using one of those quad nvme cards, don’t forget to enable bifurcation for the port, in the bios under Northbridge → IIO something

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I ended up picking up a Supermicro AOC-SLG3-2M2 which seems to be the official nvme riser, and it supports my mobo. I am relatively sure a “random” nvme riser card would work. But. Snagged one on eBay for 40 bucks so I figure it’s enterprise grade, and officially supported.

Now let’s just hope the Samsung 980 I got for it will work as intended.

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