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17 R5, NVMe compatibility
Hello community,
I have an Alienware 17 R5. My hard drive has some issues so I decided to remove it completely and buy a new SSD since there are I believe 3 SSD slots.
So in addition to the 250 Go SSD I already had, I want to add a TB SSD. I'm planning on buying the Samsung SSD 980 PRO M.2 PCIe NVMe 1TB.
The problem is some friends told me that I need to check if my pc is compatible with the NVMe first.
I need some help in how I can check if it is compatible. Does someone in the community can give me the way or the answer?
Thank you.
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Posted June 21st, 2022 16:00
To add a bit here, the 980 Pro drive will work, but not at full speed -- it will be limited by the PCIe 3 drive interface (the 980 Pro is PCIe 4, so it's actually faster than the interface the system has).
889
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Posted June 21st, 2022 17:00
Hi @Kiraness welcome to this free user to user Alienware laptop discussion forum. This is not Dell Support.
My Alienware 17 R5 laptop OS(C:) boot drive is the ultrafast M.2 2280 2TB Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe 1.3 card. This drive card also supports Bitlocker encryption protection, so if the laptop gets "lost" my personal data cannot be accessed by a third party. This 2TB card was cloned (copied) and has GPT partition format so that boot list BIOS option UEFI has been enabled. Modern enhanced performance/reliability/security with fast boot is a dramatic improvement.
My Alienware 17 R5 laptop does not have the unreliable (two drive) RAID OS(C:) boot drive option.
My disaster recovery plan includes another 2TB drive that is my standby OS(C:) boot drive, just in case my original 2TB drive cannot be recovered, and standby can be swapped in to get system up and running within minutes.
[This user does not work for Dell and volunteers their free time. Please remember to say thank you by clicking on my thumb up icon.]
JOcean
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910
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Posted June 21st, 2022 11:00
According to the specs here, an NVMe M.2 SSD is compatible. And Crucial lists an M.2 NVMe as compatible up to 2TB.
I am not a Dell employee...I am forum volunteer
Serious work on an E5430 and constantly building and working on an i5-6500 Desktop