Dell Precision T5500 - M.2 NVMe card

[Ditto]

I've decided to treat myself to a 1TB M.2 NVMe card. It's going in to a Dell Precision T5500, which although getting on few years old, with two hex core processors and a stack of memory, it still performs extremely well. I've decide I need to get in to a bit more gaming, so mostly it's going to have the games software. I understand I need to get an adapter. My plan is to use SLOT 1 on the motherboard which is specified as PCI Express 2.0 x16 Card Slot, wired as x8 (SLOT1). As this is PCIe v2 only, I want to avoid buying an over specified adapter and card. I'm interested in recommendations and advice on what sort of transfer speeds I should see.

[Ditto]

- bump as sometimes weekend posting are not a good idea

[Domino]

IIRC the m.2 interface specifically supports PCI Express 3 (unless it's 4.0 designed variant that are specifically labelled as such) - I'm not sure you'll get an adapter to overcome that.

 

Even if you could, there's major differences in the bandwidth overhead between PCIE 2 and 3 - I'm not sure you'd get the speed improvement much greater than a decent SATA SSD anyway?

[Ditto]

I agree the PCI Express 3 would be much better, and I am stuck with v2 on this old beast! There are cards that seem to support v2, and I believe that means the maximum possible is half v3. I guess this one of the reasons I wanted to check before spending cash! There are adapters (https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-M-2-Adapter-Profile-Express-Red/dp/B01FU9JS94) that offer PCIev3 support with PCIev2 compatibility (https://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-com-M-2-Adapter-Profile-Express-Red/dp/B01FU9JS94) so the question is as you point out, can it achieve performance beyond SSD on SATA. I'm already using SSD SATA 3 for the boot drive. So it really comes down to whether NVMe on PCIeV2 can outperform SSD on SATA. Where I stretch my knowledge is when counting lanes on the PCI bus. Additionally, I have heard people have implemented RAID SSD to squeeze a bit more speed. A new machine is for another day, but the NVME route is still of interest. There is

video that show it being done on a T5500, but unfortunately the link to the posters blog (at http://www.greenpcgamers.com) is blocked due to location so tricky to get to more detail.

[bald_pig]

The motherboard probably doesn't support booting from PCI-e regardless...

[Ditto]

As a rule, correct, although I believe there are ways to overcome this. For me in this case, it's a non-issue as I am am only looking at this for storage. For booting, I'm on a fast SSD, which is fine.

[Domino]

From the amazon reviews from that second card:

 

I bought this as the M2 slot on my motherboard was only PCIE Gen 2 x 2 and the drive (Samsung 970 EVO) was being limited by this. Using the adapter in a PCI Gen 3 x 4 slot allowed the drive to get to 3277MB/s up from about 800MB/s in the M2 slot.

 

I assume he means "gen2 slot" at the end of that, in which case yeah, that's not a massively appreciable benefit over SATA. And certainly not what a 970 EVO is capable of.