Optiplex 3050/5050/7050 and M.2 NVME drives

OlderFogie,

Customers may report that the 'No boot device found'  occur after encrypt the M.2 NVMe SED SSD with DDPEv8.13.0.20 on OptiPlex 7050/5050/3050 systems with Win10 OS.
At this time, double check from F2 BIOS and F12 Boot Menu, both 'Dell UEFI PBA' and 'Windows Boot manager' exists. The issue can be solved without data lost after flash BIOS to 1.3.9 and above version.

The statement does imply that one can have a bootable M.2 NVMe SSD on all three machines, and I thank you for that, but I was looking for something more along the lines of a more direct statement and some instructions on how to do the installation, much as what was done for the xx40 series.  

OlderFogie,

Below are some links that may help you resolve the installation.

OptiPlex 3050 support for PCIe M.2 SSD hard drives

Frequently asked questions regarding NVMe Solid State Drives (SSDs)

Requirements to Install Windows 7 on M2 Drives in Non-Volatile Memory express (NVMe) Storage Environments

I successfully installed W10 and booted to a Samsung 960 EVO drive in an Optiplex 3050 SFF machine.  

First thing I did was flash the BIOS to the currently available version on Dell's site.  Initially, the drive was showing up in the BIOS, but not in Windows.  Changing the SATA configuration from RAID-supported to AHCI caused the drive to appear in the drive list, and I could install Windows to it.  

At that point, I tried to restart and boot from the 960 EVO, but it was giving me "invalid boot device" errors.  I messed around with the following settings.  Not sure if any of these options actually mattered.  

-Disabled SATA drive 0 and disconnected the hard drive from the port (the only storage drive enabled was the m.2)

-Set boot to UEFI, with Legacy ROMs enabled

-Secure Boot off

-Enabled custom mode key management (PK)

At that point, I reinstalled Windows on the 960 EVO drive.  After the installation, it logged in to the Windows profile and I installed the Samsung NVMe drivers immediately.  Rebooting from the 960 EVO after this point was successful.  Windows boot manager was the first item on my boot list.

I then re-enabled Drive 0 in BIOS, reconnected the drive, deleted its option from the boot list, and rebooted into Windows on the 960 EVO successfully.

I have an Optiplex 7050 MT with an i7 6700 CPU and would like to add a Samsung 250GB 960 Evo M.2 SSD, but I'm still not sure if it'll support the faster (socket 3) type drive.  The Verified Answer is for an Optiplex 3050 SFF PC and I need to be sure before proceeding.

I have 3050 and another similar Dell systems and I have sucesfully installed the 960 EVO nvme as system drive. However, please note the following:

1. At the beggining I simply cloned the old SSD to the nvme drive and this worked fine after changing and updating the BIOS to boot from this drive. Everything was working fine aparently but when booting from the USB to create a backup with several tools like disk director or true image, they never detected the nvme, so this was a bit anoyed.

2. Seeing that, I tried to do a clean install of Windows 10 and surprise, the windows installer didn't see this nvme drive. 

3. To fix that I had to change the drive on the BIOS, SATA settings from RAID to AHCI. When I did that 2 things happened:

a. The current W10 install stopped booting.

b. Windows 10 setup, True image and the rest of bootable software started to see the nvme drive.

So after this I installed W10 as a fresh set up and it is all working perfectly. This happened with some new PCs. This is my results with this drive, as expected from other reviews I saw:

So conclusion is, yes it works perfectly but you have to update the bios and change those settings.

daviddqz,

I am in a similar circumstance where I have a OptiPlex 5050 Micro that came with a SATA SSD and I want to install an M.2 NVMe 960 Pro SSD.  I have run into the same issues with imaging tools not seeing the M.2 drive.   I use a tool called Acronis Snap Deploy.  I would like to lay down the image I previously created of the current SATA SSD onto that M.2 drive in order to keep all of the corporate structure that this image contains.  After making the suggested BIOS configuration changes I still cannot see the NVMe 960 SSD.  Any ideas?  My BIOS is currently set to Legacy Boot.  Does it need to be set to UEFI instead?

Is it easier to install these drives and make them bootable in the XX50 series than it was in the XX40 series?

It depends on the operating system. When I configured my 7040 SFF, I used an image of a then-latest Win 10 install from a ECS 1150 machine. For giggles, I tried to boot off it. Naturally, it BSOD'ed on the first try, but on the reboot, Win 10 began installing drivers after which it successfully booted! Sure, when I logged into Win 10, some drivers were missing, but a quick visit to Dell's 7040 drivers page fixed that.

So, it should be very easy to use one of these drives as a boot drive, if you're using a 16XX+ version of Windows 10. Any earlier version of Windows will likely be a struggle.

Regarding imaging tools, you need to be using late versions, which sport NVMe drivers.

I would say that cloning from legacy to UEFI won't work. When you install windows in UEFI mode it actually creates 4 different partitions, and 2 on legacy mode if I remember correctly. So there are a lot of chances you get into trouble.

Also, it´s quite unlikely you manage to install Windows in an NVME drive on PCIe on legacy mode, but that depends on the mobo really. Make a backup and give it a try!

If the 7050 supports legacy mode, I'd use that. It's simpler.