Can Inspiron 5570 boot from NVMe M.2 SSD?

According to this thread where an official Dell rep posted specs from the system, the Inspiron 5570 supports NVMe.  Claiming support for the NVMe standard (rather than just PCIe SSDs) requires that the system be able to boot from an NVMe SSD rather than just access them as data drives. However, if you want to use Ubuntu, you will probably need to go into your BIOS Setup and change the SATA Operation setting to AHCI. If it is currently set to RAID, it would mean the Intel Rapid Storage controller is enabled, and I don't think Ubuntu supports newer versions of that controller.  Switching to AHCI will disable it, and you don't need it anyway.  However, if you have an existing OS installation you want to preserve, making this change will probably render it unbootable.  If you plan to perform a clean install of Ubuntu and don't need to preserve anything, then just make this change before you attempt to install Ubuntu and you will be fine.

The system only shows a SATA Storage Interface.  If the info from Dell is correct, I would save the money and use the less expensive M.2 SATA drive.

Yes, it does show capable of using a PCIe NVMe drive but that would not be run using the NVMe controller.

The system does show it will support Optane memory with 2 PCIe lanes and NVMe 1.1

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@Saltgrass wrote:

The system only shows a SATA Storage Interface.  If the info from Dell is correct, I would save the money and use the less expensive M.2 SATA drive.

Yes, it does show capable of using a PCIe NVMe drive but that would not be run using the NVMe controller.

The system does show it will support Optane memory with 2 PCIe lanes and NVMe 1.1

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If you look at the Service Manual here, the Storage section (Table 13) clearly mentions NVMe SSDs up to 512GB, so no it's not just SATA storage or just Intel Optane -- and that table incidentally is exactly what the Dell rep posted in the thread I linked.

And claiming that the system can run a PCIe NVMe drive but it would not be run using the NVMe controller!?  Where do you come up with this nonsense, Saltgrass?  If the system has an NVMe interface, it must have a controller to actually run it, and a controller that runs an NVMe interface is by definition an NVMe controller, even if there may be another controller like the Intel RST controller in front of that when RAID mode is enabled.  Why do you insist on phrasing things to suggest that you're speaking fact when that couldn't be further from the truth, even going so far as to put the very word of your sentence that renders it false in bold text?

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@jphughan wrote:

@valentin_b, you may also want to look at this thread, including the link in that thread to another one about the Inspiron 5770.

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Thank you!

I did not immediately notice that thread.
I had doubted because of contradictory information from forums. Member of some forum reported a problem with booting from NVMe SSD in different notebook.

Doubts are dispelled now.

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@jphughan wrote:

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@Saltgrass wrote:

The system only shows a SATA Storage Interface.  If the info from Dell is correct, I would save the money and use the less expensive M.2 SATA drive.

Yes, it does show capable of using a PCIe NVMe drive but that would not be run using the NVMe controller.

The system does show it will support Optane memory with 2 PCIe lanes and NVMe 1.1

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If you look at the Service Manual here, the Storage section (Table 13) clearly mentions NVMe SSDs up to 512GB, so no it's not just SATA storage or just Intel Optane -- and that table incidentally is exactly what the Dell rep posted in the thread I linked.

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It does show a PCIe NVMe drive may be used.  It does not say there is a Storage PCIe NVMe Interface.

The below is what my XPS 13 9365 shows...

Storage
Table 10. Storage specifications

Interface
• SATA 6 Gbps

• PCIe 8 Gbps

Hard drive One M.2 SSD

Certainly. 

Recently I installed Samsung 970 EVO 250GB in my 5570 (i7). At first I just cloned my HDD and changed boot drive HDD to SSD. Machine was booting from SSD without any issues, only Samsung Magician was showing that 'Interface not supported', but it was running the performance check which was showing read speed 1800 and write speed 1500.  After a few days I changed mode 'RAID to AHCI' from BIOS and installed fresh Windows and Samsung SSD driver, Samsung Magician confirmed the Interface : PCIEe Gen. 3 X 4. But no improvement in read speed. I contacted with Dell Support, they remotely tried to solve the issue but no positive result found. Then they decided to replace the mother board and yesterday Dell technician came to my place along with a new mother board, replaced it, but no better result. (I really appreciate Dell for their support and endeavor to solve the issue, thanks to Dell). 

I do agree with 'jphughan' that "...despite using 4 lanes, this system has another bottleneck source that means an NVMe SSD will max out at around 1.8 GB/s, even if the SSD you install can go faster".

However I am satisfied with my SSD as I am getting 3 times faster speed than any SATA SSD, system is booting in seconds and applications are opening on just a click.

@Saltgrass When my machine was running on RAID mode Samsung NVMe driver denied to be installed and Magician was not working with its full functionalities and showing 'interface not supported' but detected the SSD and only the Performance Benchmark was performing speed checking. After changing to AHCI mode the Samsung NVMe driver installed without any issue and Magician started to work with its full functionalities and showing the NVMe Driver of Samsung.

@ghkaushik, that is the way it normally works.  The Magician software needs the NVMe controller driver be in charge.  When in RAID, the Intel driver is in control.  Last year it made a difference whether you were using certain drivers, but now it seems either one will get the speeds of which that system is capable.

We will see what happens with the OP, but it appears the 5570 is restricted, like the 9365.

Right now, we cannot see your attachment.  Perhaps later it will work.

@Saltgrass  In my earlier post I shared that I contacted with Dell Support, they remotely tried to solve the issue but no positive result found. Then they decided to replace the mother board and yesterday Dell technician came to my place along with a new mother board, replaced it, but no better result. At last they told me - 

"Unfortunately it does sound like some kind of compatibility or product limitation. What exactly it is, I can't say for sure. Thank you for bringing me your question." 

Today Dell (I think a senior engineer) again called me and asked about the issue , after listening the detail he assured me that they are trying to solve it. (I don't know how and when)

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@ghkaushik wrote:

@Saltgrass  In my earlier post I shared that I contacted with Dell Support, they remotely tried to solve the issue but no positive result found. Then they decided to replace the mother board and yesterday Dell technician came to my place along with a new mother board, replaced it, but no better result. At last they told me - 

"Unfortunately it does sound like some kind of compatibility or product limitation. What exactly it is, I can't say for sure. Thank you for bringing me your question." 

Today Dell (I think a senior engineer) again called me and asked about the issue , after listening the detail he assured me that they are trying to solve it. (I don't know how and when)

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The bottleneck that I summarized here and that you quoted in one of your earlier posts is explained more fully in the links I provided.  The issue is that the x4 PCIe interface is being run in power-saving GT2 mode, not in max performance GT4 mode.  An x4 interface running in GT2 mode is roughly equivalent to an x2 interface running in GT4 mode.  This mode is controlled by the system firmware, so theoretically it could be changed, but Dell does not make it a user-configurable option in the BIOS, nor have I seen any official explanation as to why this is the case.  But the technical source of the bottleneck is not a mystery.

@jphughan Yes that is the answer. Now we have to wait and see whether Dell takes any step to solve this issue or not. Dell should provide options to the users to configure their machines as per their choice. 

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@ghkaushik wrote:

Yes that is the answer. Now we have to wait and see whether Dell takes any step to solve this issue or not. Dell should provide options to the users to configure their machines as per their choice. 

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I agree to a point.  In this case, I'm completely speculating here, but it's possible that the switch was necessary due to concerns around additional power consumption (and therefore heat) that might have created problems based on other design factors like the system's designed power budget or cooling system capacity.  Or it could just have been market positioning.  Maybe Dell locked in this configuration because they knew almost all reviewers test battery life but relatively few benchmark the storage, so they might have preferred to have the battery life test come out a certain way even if it reduced storage performance rather than the other way around and didn't want to risk some reviewers configuring things in a less optimal way for the battery life use case.  It's also now relatively common practice in both the PC industry and elsewhere for OEMs to ship hardware with certain features disabled in firmware/software without offering a way to re-enable them.  Sometimes it's cheaper overall for the OEM to standardize on a single hardware design and differentiate their products this way instead of actually offering separate less capable hardware for the lower end.  Of course you can point out that they could simply keep all of the cool features enabled and offer a superior product at the lower-end product's existing price since the OEM's cost of goods is the same either way, but that runs the risk of reducing sales figures for the higher-end products that deliver higher profits.  And then there's the reality that the line on number of available configuration options has to be drawn somewhere.  Not everything can reasonably be made configurable because it would overwhelm users, and it would also create more scenarios that Dell would have to test and support.

To be clear, if I personally were in your position, I'd want my storage running as fast as possible even if I took a battery life hit, and I wouldn't consider an option to achieve that too overwhelming, so I would certainly want the option for myself.  But I also recognize that there may have been other technical limitations here, and even if not, I realize that I represent a very tiny segment of the overall market (in fact since I've never bought an Inspiron model before, I'm arguably not even in the target market at all) and also that the line on configurability has to be drawn somewhere, and reasonable people will always disagree on exactly where that should be.

@jphughan I do agree with you, IMO this is the only explanation of the Dell's marketing policy.

@jphughan wrote:

To be clear, if I personally were in your position, I'd want my storage running as fast as possible even if I took a battery life hit, and I wouldn't consider an option to achieve that too overwhelming, so I would certainly want the option for myself.  But I also recognize that there may have been other technical limitations here, and even if not, I realize that I represent a very tiny segment of the overall market (in fact since I've never bought an Inspiron model before, I'm arguably not even in the target market at all) and also that the line on configurability has to be drawn somewhere, and reasonable people will always disagree on exactly where that should be.

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How would we the Inspiron users know about this limitation of this product where Dell is advertising it as a high end model  (i7 8th gen, 2TB HDD, 16 GB RAM, 4GB DDR5 dedicated GPU) with good specs , where they also claiming it has M.2 PCIe (Gen 3 X 4) NVME slot. Dell should be more transparent in this regard and let the customers choose as per their own requirement where we trust a lot on the brand name of Dell.

 

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