As mentioned in the title, I have a gigabyte 9th Gen Intel i-core motherboard. I am curious if anyone has any ideas on possibilities of modding my bios. More specifically, modifying the optane support to allow for placement of the optane module arbitrarily in any slot, as opposed to only offering slot "9". That's the tldr/gist of my request, but I'll give more deets below.
My limited budget has dictated a few of my system design choices. My motherboard being 1. It is a gigabyte b365m ds3h wifi usb. For the most part I've been happy with it out of the box, but expandability isn't super high on it, with only 1 m.2 slot, and 2 1xpci-e slots, not including the 16x that's immediately used for GPU. Being budget minded, I got a decent nvme SSD, one of the Samsung Evo series though I can't recall the actual model number RN. It's 512G, big enough to store my os, and several games that'd otherwise take a while to load, to keep things snappy. This takes up my only m.2 slot. The bulk of my storage has to be taken up by a mechanical HDD. And not just that, were talking an hgst slug if you must know, not even a wd black. So when I saw some optane modules getting dumped for dirt cheap and realized the caching ability of one might add some zip to my spinning rust, I jumped on it, as well as a slot adapter to mount into one of my pci-e slots. Sure enough, it's recognized by my bios, and even windows as a normal nvme SSD, as it would if not activated for caching. It is when I went to activate it's caching ability where I ran into my snag. Since my mobo only has 1 m.2 slot, gigabyte wrote the bios to assume that's the only place you'd install an optane module, and thus that is the only option the bios offers. Slot 9 is just the pci-e designator for my m.2. I can't use that since it already has a drive on it, which holds my system. As proof of concept for myself, I did a little research to find a utility (can't remember the name ATM, since I'm away from my computer, but it begins with P) to allow me to use an/any SSD as a drive cache, and pointed it to my spinning rust as the drive to be cached, and the optane in one of my pci-e slots on its adapter as the cache. And it works. Rather well in fact. Much faster access for things I load a lot from the HDD. And the program self reports a cache hit rate of anywhere from 40-80% depending on what I'm doing. The problem is, a) the free trial will expire, and I'll have to purchase, which may be worth it. But b) I'd suspect the native optane support would likely perform even better than some ad-hoc software solution. Hence why I'd like to unlock that option in the bios to tell it to activate in a different slot.
I did search other groups before asking here. Any other bios modding seemed to be on forums related to computer brands, like s/Lenovo or HP or whatever, or a tiny 52 member group about bios modding itself. Which would be a rather small hive mind. This one popped up using a few different search terms and it made sense to me that if any group of people are skilled at coaxing systems to bend to their will, it would be the hacking community. So ideas?
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from hacking: security in practice https://ift.tt/4IzN1v9
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