Inspiron 5675, NVMe M.2 full speed

To assist other Inspiron 5675 owner's, please post the specific PCIe add in card that you installed. Also post any installation or setup issues you may have encountered.

Hi, Chris. Did you get a response to this or know of a thread that discusses how to get max speed from NVMe on the 5675? I have one coming and an SSD for the NVMe motherboard slot but would like to get max speed from it if at all possible.

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@DougDarwrote:

Hi, Chris. Did you get a response to this or know of a thread that discusses how to get max speed from NVMe on the 5675? I have one coming and an SSD for the NVMe motherboard slot but would like to get max speed from it if at all possible.

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There is no control over the speed at which the motherboard's M.2-slot runs a PCIe/NVMe SSD. However, it will be very fast and many times faster than a SATA-based SSD.

Hi, Mrgit. Could you post a link to the riser you used to make this work?  Thanks!

Agreed. We can't do anything about the number of channels dedicated to the M.2 NVMe port which only allows/has assigned to it x2 channels. 

The Samsung 960 EVO is designed to use x4 channels so by sticking it in the M.2 port we are cutting its capabilities in half.  The OP's proposed work around was to use a PCI adapter/riser.

Guessing from what I've found so far, an M2 adapter (around 15 dollars) can be installed in one of the 2 available x16 slots (slot 1 being used by the graphics card, slot 4 is open). OP said he got it to work, would just like to know which adapter he used and what special procedure (if any) needed to be followed to allow boot to the SDD when installed on a riser.

Figured I already dropped 200 on a 500GB EVO, so what's another 15?  The adapter will be here sometime next week and I'll post updates with benchmarks to compare motherboard NVMe vs riser speeds. More to follow...

EVO installed successfully as boot disk on a PCI riser and operating at max speed. Benchmark screenshot attached.

I used the following Mailiya PCI 3.0 x4 riser card but I'd guess you could use any comparable one as there are several to choose from.

One note: I normally use R-Drive Image to clone drives for customers with much success but R-Drive did not work for this.  It took 45 minutes (x2) to create and then restore an image that failed due to signature collision because I tried to leave the original drive in place (so I could use it for data) and just force boot to the EVO from the boot manager. Mistake.

On second attempt I just used Samsung's data migration tool and it was insanely fast, taking about 15 minutes total to clone.  This time, though, I removed the original before powering it back up and it worked like a charm. Fired right up and I didn't even need to resize the partitions to use the additional space I gained from the 256GB SATA M.2 to 500GB EVO.

Now, I just gotta figure out how to get the SATA back into the box without it causing signature collision hate and discontent.

Just FYI, I reinstalled the SATA drive and booted back up and now the SATA was the one that was set "Offline" in Disk Management because of a signature collision.  The EVO had been accepted as the boot disk.

I then had to clean the SATA using the diskpart command because there were locked volumes that Windows Disk Management wouldn't let me delete.  

I used the following directions to Clean the SATA which could then be reinitialized and now is being used for a data drive.

http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/005929en

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@suemccartinwrote:

The bios on these machines you can't go in and set boot priority anymore it doesn't work.  You have to hit f12 at boot to select boot device don't know if that would have fixed your issue or not.  My WD came with a disk utility I told it to make the m2 master next boot it still booted off the spinner, only fix was f12 no more issues but I did take the os off the original hard drive.

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UEFI machines use Windows Boot Manager.

See my post here, and follow its link if you must.

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-Desktops/Unable-to-change-primary-boot-drive-to-SSD-on-Alienware-Aurora/m-p/6072091#M3359

The bios on these machines you can't go in and set boot priority anymore it doesn't work.  You have to hit f12 at boot to select boot device don't know if that would have fixed your issue or not.  My WD came with a disk utility I told it to make the m2 master next boot it still booted off the spinner, only fix was f12 no more issues but I did take the os off the original hard drive.