Introducing a new RISC-V Mainboard from DeepComputing

[NM64]

Another thought I just had—around 5 years ago, m.2 SATA SSDs were pretty common. Why not add a SATA-only m.2 slot? Or is the issue that SATA still requires PCIe lane(s) due to SATA presumably not being natively integrated into the SOC directly?

@Adrian_Joachim

M.2 is a connector with multiple different pinouts, the keys are both to tell you what kind it is and prevent you from plugging the wrong thing into the wrong port.

NVMe and wifi are both just PCIe devices, and so the m.2 connector is simply being used as a smaller version of the bog-standard PCIe slot you find on desktop motherboards or the like (even more-so since I don’t believe any Framework mainboards support m.2 SATA SSDs).

There was already another user that repurposed their wifi slot on the x86 Framework 13 mainboard for their SSD in order to use the main NVMe slot for an external GPU and it all “just worked”… at least on Linux:

How to boot framework from external SSD enclosure

I am attempting to add an egpu to an AMD mainboard through the m.2 port generally reserved for the nvme SSD. The mainboard is in a cooler master case and did not come from a laptop. I have a Samsung 990 pro with both ubuntu and Windows partitions. What I eventually want is for the computer to always boot from the exteranl SSD(plugged into top right usb4.0 port) once it has been moved into an external case. For background I installed windows first, created a free partition then installed Ubuntu …