This particular NVMe PCIe drive advertises it works with PCIe 3.0 x4, but various sites report it works on PCIe 2.0 (at a somewhat reduced speed, but still fast).
The Precision T5500 has only PCIe 2.0 slots.
Without a great deal of understanding of specific kinds of PCIe slots, is there hope of plugging one of these NVMe drives into the Precision T5500 and booting from it?
-Noel
Though the drive may indeed work, the system will not be able to boot from it. Booting from NVMe generally requires a very new (2016 oldest) system with a very new UEFI setup routine.
Not without a card like this:
tinkertry.com/how-to-install-a-2nd-samsung-950-pro-m2-nvme-on-superserver
Even then, as others have noted, it likely will not be a bootable device.
Thanks to both of you. The adapter wouldn't be a problem, but inability to boot because of the BIOS throws my whole idea for incremental improvement off.
I already have a PCIe controller rocking 8 SATA III SSDs. Throughput is in the ballpark with the NVMe drive and actually very good, but the reduced latency of the NVMe stack would speed up small I/O operations enough more that it would make the system capable of even better overall performance. My ATTO 4K numbers are only in the vicinity of 125 MB/sec.
I will plan to boot from one of these NVMe cards in my next new workstation build, and have the RAID array serve data.
-Noel