Area-51m R2, upgrading storage to three M.2 SSD

Solid-state drive⁠—M.2 slot one
Solid-state drive⁠—M.2 slot two
Solid state drive—M.2 slot three
Solid state drive—M.2 slot four
Solid-state drive interposer board

Dell Support for Alienware Area-51m R2 Service Manual includes Installing the solid-state drive interposer board which provides the additional SSD-3 & SSD-4 slots for M.2 NVMe drives. 

To get these parts, call Dell Support and ask them to raise an order for all the 20 separate parts (no url, no kit) which includes the 2.5-inch cage, NVMe silicone interposer board D3P25, cable #1 2JH8P, cable #2 5F1WR and all the other separate parts of screws, etc. Also ask for all of these parts be included in your Dell System Warranty. Currently, all these parts can be purchased for under USD100. 

These parts are also being sold on the internet, example Amazon.com: Deal4GO SATA Interposer Board D3P25 LS-J106P to NVMe M.2 SSD Hard Drive SSD-3 & SSD-4 w/ 2.5" HDD Bracket R24Y6 for Dell Alienware Area-51m R2: Electronics. 

The up to 2TB M.2 Samsung SSD 980 Pro PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe is now advocated because of market availability, reduced cost and it is a backwards compatible and future proof drive. The OS (C:) boot drive partition format should be the modern GPT so that BIOS boot list option UEFI can be enabled for fast boot. (The up to 2TB M.2 Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe was recommended.) 

I  followed the instructions, but am still having difficulty.  I currently have 2x2TB SSDs installed as RAID0.    I installed a 2TB drive into SSD slot 3 and a 1TB drive into SSD slot 4.  Sadly, my  system would not boot into windows 10 after doing that.  I ran hardware diagnostics and all 4 SSD drives test fine so I know there is no hardware problem.  Also, the advanced report shows the MBR is now pointing to SSD slot 3 even though I have not changed any BIOS settings.  I thought that was strange, so I booted into BIOS but see no option to point the MBR back to the RAID0 windows 10 system.  So, I am stuck.  I tried taking the SSD out of slot 3 and leaving the one in slot 4 but that did not fix the issue.  Any suggestions on how  to fix this problem would  be much appreciated!

YouAreLove,

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Hi @YouAreLove sorry missed your post, if my @crimsom link is not included, I do not get notification. 

Please confirm your system is Alienware Area-51m R2. 

The advanced MBR report should not have changed to point to the SSD3 drive, the system will not boot unless the SSD3 drive has operating system installed. 

Please remove drives from SSD3 and SSD4 slots on the Sled board and the boot from RAID should be reinstated. At Alienware logo splash screen press and hold down the F12 key to open boot menu. The MBR boot option #1 should point to RAID. Please share picture taken by external camera. 

Please undertake the Windows PowerShell's diagnose and fix windows operating system information included within Audio Driver Issues - Troubleshooter always resets these to work - Dell Community. 

Has normal function of Alienware Area-51m R2 RAID been reinstated, so that Sled board function can now be investigated? 

Note: the slow drive MBR partition format is being used. Please consider update to the modern drive GPT partition format and enable BIOS boot list option UEFI. How to convert Windows MBR to GPT drive and switch BIOS to UEFI | Windows Central.  

@crimsom see above message.

Hi @Indium ,

Thanks for your help. Yes, I have an Alienware Area-51m R2 running the latest version of Windows 10 along with WSL2/Ubuntu.  Dell tech support got me be back up and running.  However, I had several further issues trying to get my newly purchased M.2 SSDs installed into slots 3 and 4.  The actual issue is gen3 vs gen4 technology, at least from my experimentation thus far, and Dell tech support claimed this as well even though gen4 is supposedly backwards compatible with gen3. I installed a gen3 Crucial P3 2T M.2 SSD into slot 4 and have had no issues thus far. However, the system was unstable and had blue screen crashes since I had a gen4 WD_BLACK 1TB M.2 SSD in slot 3. I took the gen4 card out of slot 3 and thus far I have avoided blue screen crashes, but I will push the system to see if I can cause another blue screen crash. We will see! I will be replacing the WD gen4 SSD with another Crucial P3 2TB SSD which I will put back into slot 3.

Hi @YouAreLove thank you for sharing update. 

WD cards seemingly have an unknown problem with Dell laptops. Samsung and Crucial drive cards work on my laptop.