I bought my personnal computer at the end of 2014. This is really old in the modern world and today booting my Ubuntu is not fast.

• switch on the power button
• 15s after I saw the grub menu
• 1 minute and 15s after I got the login screen

I admit it is not catastrophic, but I can have a better user experience :-). I also noticed that Firefox took 9s to start. So I decided to upgrade. First I added 8Gb of DDR3 1600 Mhz. And decided to use M.2 SSD disk instead of my old SATA disk.

Before buying the new disk I try to find the supported PCI revision and speed of my M.2 connector. With ga-h97-d3h mobo, I checked the layout in the user manual and it is really unclear.

M.2 is just an interface. The user manual says that it is socket 3 and type M. So we know that it is for SSD (SATA or PCIE) with up to four lanes. The lanes are bidirectionnal signaling pairs used to carry data. As you expect, the more lanes you get the faster is your disk. On the diagram the left part is the PCIe area and there is no link to the M.2 in the right part. The other question is the supported revision. This mobo can support up to PCIe revision 3.0 but all the PCIe buses on the mobo doesn't support 3.0.

Internet has some posts about the PCIE support of GA-H97-D3H but no clear answer.

Installation

Booting on M.2 was relatively new thing when H97 chipset was created. But I haven't seen any difficulty except that I had to upgrade the BIOS to install F7 version (according to Gybabyte announcement )). Before the F6 version you can use nvme disk but you cannot boot it. I reinstalled my Ubuntu. I didn't record the installation time but it seems really fast. With the lspci option, I checked the speed:

# lspci |grep -i nvme
02:00.0 Non-Volatile memory controller: Samsung Electronics Co Ltd NVMe SSD Controller SM961/PM961
lspci -vvv -s 02:00.0|grep LnkCap
        LnkCap: Port #0, Speed 8GT/s, Width x4, ASPM L1, Exit Latency L0s unlimited, L1 <64us

Great! I got four lanes (Width x4) for my new disk.

Final benchmark

• switch on the power button
• 10s after I saw the grub menu
• 25s after I got the login screen (more than three time faster!)

Now Ubuntu's desktop is really reactive. If you have the same mobo, or an H97-based mobo do not hesitate to upgrade.