Any Chance a Samsung 960 PRO M.2 NVMe SSD could work in a T5500

[Noel Carboni]

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

[ejn63]

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.

[theflash1932]

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.

[Noel Carboni]

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