Area-51m, Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe, can't install the driver

Go into the system's BIOS Setup and check the "SATA Operation" setting, which despite the name applies to NVMe SSDs as well.  I wonder if Dell will ever update that setting's name -- or if they did for this new Area 51m, please report back.  Anyhow, if it's set to RAID, that's the reason it's not working.  It needs to be in AHCI mode in order to accept the Samsung AHCI NVMe driver.  The catch is that you're supposed to change that setting prior to installing the OS, because changing it from one state to the other will cause an existing OS to become unbootable, since that OS will have been configured to expect a different boot configuration.  There are apparently ways to work around that through some combination of changing registry settings before making the switch, going into Safe Mode, etc., but I haven't looked into those in detail.

I had the same problem on a Precision 5580 where I installed the Samsung 970 Pro 1TB in the second Flexbay. The solution was to go into BIOS and disable Intel VMD for that card. My speculation is the Intel VMD acts as RAID controller and the Samsung installer thus can't see the drive natively and refuses install.

I disabled VMD for the default Toshiba m2 and saw no difference so far. Will observe this for a while.

Worked for me. After changing to AHCI mode in BIOS I was able to install the samsung Evo Plus driver and could see my drive temperature with the Samsung Magician software. Thx!

@jphughan 

Thanks for the tip about the BIOS setting.

This resolved the problem for me with my Dell XPS 8940 and an M.2 Samsung 970 EVO Plus

This worked!  Thank you!

Thanks for this reply trying to figure out why my friend's computer won't detect his NVME Samsung 970. Device manager should show nvme storage controller but it does not. SSD works and the machine boots from it fine but it is not recognized by the system and I cannot install the Samsung NVME driver as it does not detect the drive neither does Samsung Magician.

On another note yes there is a workaround for switching from another format to AHCI without having to reinstall the entire OS I have done it once and it worked fine though in the past I have reinstalled as I was unaware of this simple fix   It was as you said a small registry edit once in safe mode. But I can't remember the details now. 

My BIOS in my Inspiron  3542 is already set to AHCI but I cannot install the driver for the Samsung 970 Evo Plus. Hoping to clone the 2.5 Sata to the new Evo+ and install in new Dell G7 7700. I was able to format the 970 Plus and the Samsung Disk Migration software did recognize the drive and does appear like it can copy the files. Any ideas here? The directions state the driver needs to be installed first.

Just had to do the same thing with my m17 R4.  

Why does Dell use RAID to set up systems??

Beyond its partnership with Intel, it makes factory assembly and deployment easier.  Since the systems are built for Dell by contract (as are almost all notebooks) manufacturers, which may use multiple models of drive on the assembly line, only one software image is needed, regardless of whether a system comes with an SSD from Samsung, Hynix, Kioxia, etc.

I was at my wit's end with this problem. Thank you for sharing.