Should I use an M.2 drive for MacOS boot?

[MusicHacker]

First customac build, an i7-7700k on a Gigabyte Z270 board (Gaming 8). The motherboard has M.2 slots and I'm wondering if it is as simple to use an M.2 SSD (Samsung 500 GB 860 EVO M.2 Sata III) as my MacOS boot drive as it is to use the standard SATA version? The priority is problem-free installation. Thanks!

 

[Jamesbond007]

First customac build, an i7-7700k on a Gigabyte Z270 board (Gaming 8). The motherboard has M.2 slots and I'm wondering if it is as simple to use an M.2 SSD (Samsung 500 GB 860 EVO M.2 Sata III) as my MacOS boot drive as it is to use the standard SATA version? The priority is problem-free installation. Thanks!

Sure you can. Using a M.2 SATA SSD is just the same as a 2.5 SATA SSD from the viewpoint of MacOS (and Windows). It will be recognized directly by MacOS Sierra 10.12.6 and High Sierra.

 

[MusicHacker]

Thanks. That's useful. I've seen some comments about M.2 drives not being recognised by clover, but I'm guessing that must be something to do with bios configuration rather than clover, right?

 

[MusicHacker]

Ok. I guess I need to read up on nvme. Are all m.2 drives nvme? I thought it would be a simple matter of the BIOS recognising the drive and then the OS being able to make use of it just like a regular SATA drive. But if MacOS needs to be specially configured for the M.2 boot drive to be recognised then, since this is a first build, I would prefer to keep it simple and stick with SATA.

Can anyone given me an explanation (or a pointer to an explanation) of the relationship between BIOS, M.2, NVME and MacOS? Thanks!

 

[A-Funny-Name]

Correct me if I am wrong, but the M.2 that use Sata are much slower than the ones that use NVMe.

So if you are going to bother go all in with NVMe, from what I gather all you need is NVMeGeneric.kext

"Apple's High Sierra now natively supports NVMe SSDs. For Sierra and earlier macOS, see RehabMan's [Guide] HackrNVMeFamily co-existence with IONVMeFamily using class-code spoof as his driver will allow NVMe SSDs to be used as boot drives."

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/os-x-driver-for-nvme-m-2-solid-state-drives-released.181387/