Dell Ultra-Speed Drive Quad NVMe M.2 PCIe x16 Card in a T7610

There are multiple issues with M.2 NVMe SSDs and the Precision T7610.  I posted on similar issues with Asus Hyper M.2 quad and the T7610 here.

What is supported without doing anything special is running one M.2 NVMe SSD per motherboard PCIe slot as data drives only.

Unless the BIOS is updated by Dell or a mod, the T7610 doesn't have PCIe bifurcation support.  The Dell Ultra-Speed Quad required motherboard bifurcation support.  So, if you do try to use it you'll only see one SSD - kind of pointless.

The workaround for the lack of PCIe bifurcation motherboard support is to get a quad M.2 NVMe card with similar functionality to manage the PCIe lanes on the card.  PCIe lane traffic is managed with a PCIe lane switch chip - more expensive, of course.  I put together a list of quad cards that have this here - I am using one of these quad cards in a different Dell system with no bifurcation support.

It appears that booting or running Windows from M.2 NVMe doesn't work on the T7610 for whatever reason without doing something special.  "Something special" options are:

1. Boot with Legacy mode set in the BIOS to a short list of NVMe SSDs that have a Legacy Option ROM.  The Samsung 950 PRO is the go-to device for this (note later 960 and 970 models don't have a Legacy Option ROM and won't work).  The Plextor M8Pe is another option (in a quad device you'd probably want the no-heatsink M8PeGN version).  Note you must go against common advice and initialize the boot SSD MBR and NOT GPT for this to work.  (NVMe data drives can generally be initialized GPT.)  (Caveat - NVMe SSDs with Option ROMs take up memory in the BIOS - too many different devices with Option ROMs can overflow the BIOS space for this.  In other words, I wouldn't mix a 950 PRO and M8Pe in the same machine.)  I've been able to boot off both 950 PRO and M8Pe in a Dell machine with no UEFI support - so I know this works.
2. The second option to "fix" missing/broken NVMe boot support is to chain boot to a working UEFI implementation in software rather than firmware in the motherboard.  I've seen this work with both pure Legacy BIOS systems (no UEFI at all) and systems with partially implemented/broken UEFI BIOS support.  Clover is often used for this.  I'm using it myself in an older non-UEFI Dell system.  However, it is not an out-of-the-box setup and requires lots of configuration to get working.  (Obviously, this option requires initializing the drive GPT and NOT MBR.)

Thank you for your incredibly detailed response. This is super helpful. I don't mind not being able to boot from the drive in the card but I do need more than 1 drive if possible. I'll check out your list of cards that work better than the Dell card or I'll just buy a bigger SSD and use the Dell card. Problem is I need at least 1.5TB of space and obviously using multiple drives is a lot cheaper but then I do get the overhead of RAID so maybe 1 big drive is the way to go. 

If you're only using one M.2 NVMe SSD per PCIe slot you can just use a generic M.2 NVMe to PCIe adapter card for this.  Lots of choices available.  For a specific example of what I've used see second paragraph of my post here.

Pictures upside down... go figure! Maybe I am not the right guy for this task! 

Hello Techgee,

I am creating a 950 Pro boot drive on my t7610 based on your link something special.

I formatted the 950 Pro with MBR with a NTFS partition.

When it came to the bios, it did not show a pice adapter in place. both the USB and the pie card file system list is the same...should these be different? Please see screen shots.

Can you please help in this? It would be greatly appreciated!

OK never mind ...diskpart was used at bios to change to GPT and now it boots to the 950 Pro. Different than your experience don't know why

Thanks