Orico Nvme Cloner
Marguerite Gilbeau
Before getting the refurbished T5600 that received yesterday, I searched on Dell Community and see if PCIe boot with m.2 drive possible on this machine, and all negative. Once T5600 arrived, I installed a dual-NVMe PCIe adapter on it and successfully built a Win10 system with UEFI boot. Here's some of the information and let me know if you need further details:
That means it bypass mainboard's BIOS or UEFI and allow boot from any detected storage device, including NVMe drive on PCIe adaptor. In other words, it works for almost any PCs with PCIe slot to boot from NVMe. I even try it on an Intel i7 870 PC and works fine!
Detail steps as below:
1. Follow NVME/Clover thread to set up Clover USB.
2. Install Win10 on SSD thru legacy BIOS.
3. Install cloner (I use Macrium Reflect) and clone Win10 SSD to NVME
4. Log into Win10 on SSD and convert NVME from MBR to GPT.
5. Use Clover USB to boot into Clover and choose, start Windows EFI to boot into NVME.
6. Leave the USB key in for every boot.
The Dell T5600 supports Legacy Boot, so you should be able to boot from a M.2 NVMe SSD as long as it has a Legacy Option ROM. Only a handful of M.2 NVMe SSD devices were made with a Legacy Option ROM, though.
The ORICO PRS2 is NOT a NVMe adapter. It's a SATA adapter that provides dual M.2 SATA SSD RAID. It doesn't support 'M'-keyed M.2 SSDs - meaning NVMe. You'll get similar performance to any other format SATA SSDs in a similar RAID setup.
I'm using Western Digital Black NVMe SSD M.2 im not sure if they support Legacy Boot Rom as you mentioned. If not, I was wondering if there are any cheap raid controller that support Legacy Boot Rom for NVMe.
The Samsung 950 PRO (was available in 256GB or 512GB) is the go-to M.2 NVMe device with a Legacy Option ROM. Seems the Plextor 8MPe (which also has a Legacy Option ROM) has been tried here in the Dell Precision T5600, but had compatibility issues - recognized in BIOS, but failed part-way through boot. Similar to my experience on a Dell X58 chipset non-UEFI system. Although, I was able to boot and it worked fine once booted, it took 1 1/2 minutes to boot (obviously some boot-time communications handshaking issues). The performance and 1TB was nice, but I passed on the slow boot. Samsung 950 PRO 512GB was flawless, with similar performance. Got mine off ebay.
To use the Legacy Option ROM the SSD needs to be initialized MBR, BIOS set to Legacy Boot and Legacy Option ROM's enabled if there is such a BIOS setting. I usually set to AHCI so I don't have to mess with injecting Intel RST drivers during Windows install (and besides Samsung NVMe driver needs AHCI, if you want to use it instead of Windows default driver or Intel RST).
I don't know of any M.2 NVMe SSD RAID controllers that are cheap - at least I wouldn't consider the High Point SSD7101A-1 cheap at $400. (It also isn't clear to me whether or not this requires motherboard PCIe bifurcation support - meaning only works on newer motherboards.)
- Clover Configuration
Sometimes I found Clover bootloader may not boot correctly (stuck on drive detection, lead to system reboot, etc.). Note that the original concept of Clover is to build a "Hackintosh" system to run Apple OS X on non-Apple hardware. The USB stick generated from the Boot Disk Utility comes with lots of useless stuff in our case. I followed this post to configure Clover, then my system smooth on every boot.
- Choosing NVMe adapter
Apart from high-end adapter, I could only budget to choose cheap cards like costing at US$12 something. You may find lots of combo adapters that comes with 1 B-key slot and 1 M-key slot. I once wondering who would need such an odd combination. But soon I realize that it just serves our needs! T5600 comes with 4 HDD SATA port but only 3 15-pin power cable. And I never wanted to add any power cable splitter. These kinds of combo adapter allow me to connect a m2 SATA SSD without additional power cable. On the other hand, Clover can be installed not only on USB stick but also harddisk. Therefore, I can now run Clover bootloader from the m2 SATA and Windows from NVMe, i.e. no need using USB stick as bootloader. Perfect!
This changes affected normal reading of NVMe on PCIe adapter. In fact, even if you install the NVMe set as spare drive but not the OS drive, you would only locate it in MMC as an unknown drive and cannot format.
Interesting! Samsung EVO 860 maximum r/w speed at 550/520 mb/s. That means even though you've got 4 units of EVO 860 setup as RAID0 with H310, maximum speed would not exceed 1000 mb/s. Would you like to share how to make it?
There really isnt a need to boot from nvme drive on pci. That's if you have the Perc H310 pci card. I installed a samsung 860 evo ssd attached to my perc pci card under UEFI in my T3600. Crystal disk Mark reflects 3490.7MB Read and 2564.3 MB Write for sequential. Im rather pleased with it.
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