XPS 8920, expansion possibilities

I'm not saying it won't work, but I've never heard of running more than one M.2-PCIe/NVMe SSD. Most people run the on-board one and then run the others as SATA (hopefully, mostly SSD).

I think the installed M.2-PCIe/NVMe SSD wants to be bootable C: (in Windows anyway). I've never tried Linux on my (similar to yours) Aurora-R6.

Finally, see this:

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware-General/Alienware-Aurora-R6-Booting-Linux-on-PCIe-M-2/m-p/5520641

EDIT: Add-in PCIe cards normally use whatever lanes electrically available at the slot (usually determined by slot length, but not always) . Newer cards should support the higher-bandwidth v3.0 PCIe lanes.

Thanks for the quick reply, esp reference of nvme load modules.  I understand that opensuse, at least, pretty much automatically accommodates in its installation process.  Following Dell and opensuse instructions, I had no problem with the linux installation.  

I'm hoping if someone knows that the z270 chipset cannot deal with two x4 streams simultaneously.

Best, jim

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@jbennett0wrote:

I'm hoping if someone knows that the z270 chipset cannot deal with two x4 streams simultaneously.

Best, jim

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AFAIK, the chipset and cpu can use all the available PCIe lanes concurrently. Whether two sets or x4 are being used for SSD access is irrelevant I think. There's a lot of others doing other stuff (like running the video-card(s)).