Green PC Gamers

All my PCs at home have fully populated M.2 sockets that are on-board the motherboard, and things work great when there are no problems.

But a recent 48 hour outage where I had to troubleshoot my PC from a Windows Update gone wrong has got me to thinking I should look into a more convenient method of using M.2 w/o having to nearly dismantle my PCs to do troubleshooting.

So, how about the FlexBays of the 5820/7820 that can take M.2 trays?

Can a 5820/7820 accomodate 4 x M.2 drives installed into 4 FlexBays?

Yes, you can use 2 of the flex bays at one time.

However, there are only 2 PCIe NVMe ports on the system board.

So, for the second 2 ports you'd have to use one of the supported controllers w/Cables.

Check out these videos:

Precision T5820 T7820 T7920 NVMe:



Precision T5820 Broadcom Mega Raid:

Ah, the 8i and 16i MegaRAID controllers listed on your site are expensive relative to the cost of the workstation; are there any less expensive alternative controller cards that would work for my use case?

Can I use any PCIe SAS controller?

The less expensive option may be to use something like an Asus hyper card. It does take up a pcie x16 slot. But holds up to 4 nvme drives. The board has to support bifurcation for all the drives to be read. But either of those workstations do that just fine. Or possibly whatever machine your using now supports it as well .

I would like to use the Dell DPWC300 Card to use one or two NVMe M2 SSD in my T5820 workstation.
Please could someone answer following questions?

1. Can the SKT0 NVMe SSD be configured as a boot drive?
2. How performes such boot drive used in this PCIE DPWC300 card compared with some trafitional configured SSD in the standard bay of the Dell
5820?

Many thanks!