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The B75M-D3H was not designed to accommodate NVMe SSDs. The motherboard features one SATA III and five SATA II connectors for storage, explaining its initial lack of support for booting from NVMe drives. Nonetheless, users can employ M.2 to PCIe adapters, allowing M.2 drives to connect with the motherboard via its expansion ports. That is precisely the approach WhiteCamellia took to use his Western Digital WD SN740 with the B75M-D3H motherboard.
The SN740 is a PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD that provides sequential read and write speeds of up to 2,000 MB/s. When installed on a slower interface, it logically results in reduced performance. On the B75M-D3H motherboard, the SN740 operates at PCIe 2.0 x4 speeds. This limitation is not due to the motherboard itself, as the B75M-D3H has a fully functional PCIe 3.0 x16 expansion slot. However, when paired with a Sandy Bridge processor, that slot operates at PCIe 2.0 speeds, which we suspect is the case with WhiteCamellia.
PCIe 2.0 storage speeds may seem underwhelming in modern times, considering PCIe 5.0 drives have been around for a couple of years now. However, the transition from SATA III to PCIe 2.0 is quite substantial and could revive aging systems to bring some snappiness to the operating system and everyday applications.
For quite some time, enthusiasts have modified firmware to enable unsupported processors or SSDs to function with newer motherboards. Regarding the B75M-D3H, it’s unclear whether Gigabyte intentionally or unintentionally provided NVMe boot support. The PKfail vulnerability impacts numerous Intel platforms, covering the 60-series to 100-series chipsets, all of which received firmware updates from Gigabyte in September 2024. It’s possible that this new firmware introduced similar functionality to other older motherboards aside from the B75M-D3H.
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