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August 16th, 2022 13:00
Samsung 970 Evo Plus on Dell Inc. 0PXWHK (U3E1)
Inspiron 5680
My Inspiron 5680 has Dell Inc. 0PXWHK (U3E1) motherboard. My PCIe 3.0 x4 slot is open, will I be able to use a Samsung - 970 EVO Plus 2TB PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe on this board?
Thanks!
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RoHe
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45.2K Posts
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August 16th, 2022 16:00
Is the M.2 slot (#16 on motherboard) already occupied?
To use the PCI-e x4 slot (#24) with any NVME SSD, you're going to need a PCI-e x4 > NVME adapter card.
If BIOS is set to RAID now, you need to change that to AHCI (assuming you have both options in BIOS) before installing that card. So check that setting first, but do not change it. If it's set to RAID, you have to do this the right way or Windows will become unbootable.
bcdedit /set {current} safeboot minimal and press Enter
bcdedit /deletevalue {current} safeboot and press Enter
Now you can install the x4>NVME adapter with SSD installed on it. The x4 adapter and SSD will probably need their own drivers installed. And you will need to format the SSD before you can use it for routine storage or backup.
JRDubbleU
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August 17th, 2022 05:00
Wow! Thank you for taking so much time to answer! I had no idea about the adapter. Will there be any problem with using this drive as a boot drive? And thank you for the map of the motherboard, I've been searching for days.
JRDubbleU
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August 17th, 2022 11:00
I'm almost certain the M.2 is available. But, because it's so difficult for me to pull this machine out and open it up I have yet to do so and CPU-Z and Speccy aren't calling that slot out specifically. I know that's an unhelpful and annoying answer, but I'm planning to use the M.2 slot.
RoHe
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45.2K Posts
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August 17th, 2022 11:00
You didn't answer my question... Is the M.2 slot already occupied? If not, you can put the new SSD in that slot and image the existing boot drive onto it to make the SSD the new boot drive.
There are a number of steps involved to make an SSD in the M.2 slot the boot drive so we need to know exactly what you're planning before giving you more details.
Don't know if an SSD on an PCI-e x4 adapter card can be the boot drive in this PC model. It probably depends on whether the card requires its own driver which won't get loaded until after Windows starts to boot...
RoHe
10 Elder
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45.2K Posts
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August 17th, 2022 12:00
Is your boot (C:) drive a hard drive?
You can also click Start>Run and type in msinfo32.exe and click OK. When that opens click Components>Storage>Disks in left pane. When right pane updates see what it says for "model" and "size" of each installed drive. If it says any of them is "NVME", then the M.2 slot is in use.
If "size" is 1T or 2T, it's likely a HDD. If that's the case, then M.2 slot is probably empty.
JRDubbleU
4 Posts
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August 17th, 2022 12:00
It looks to be installed elsewhere:
Description Disk drive
Manufacturer (Standard disk drives)
Model SK hynix SC311 SATA 128GB
Bytes/Sector 512
Media Loaded Yes
Media Type Fixed hard disk
Partitions 4
SCSI Bus 0
SCSI Logical Unit 0
SCSI Port 0
SCSI Target ID 4
Sectors/Track 63
Size 119.24 GB (128,034,708,480 bytes)
Total Cylinders 15,566
Total Sectors 250,067,790
Total Tracks 3,969,330
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #1, Partition #0
Partition Size 500.00 MB (524,288,000 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 1,048,576 bytes
Partition Disk #1, Partition #1
Partition Size 105.70 GB (113,498,914,816 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 659,554,304 bytes
Partition Disk #1, Partition #2
Partition Size 11.85 GB (12,721,324,032 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 114,159,517,696 bytes
Partition Disk #1, Partition #3
Partition Size 1.06 GB (1,142,947,840 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 126,881,890,304 bytes
RoHe
10 Elder
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45.2K Posts
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August 17th, 2022 12:00
When I searched for "SK hynix SC311 SATA 128GB", I find both a 2.5" SSD and an M.2 SSD...??
msinfo32.exe labeled it "SATA" so if it's in the M.2 slot, then we have to make sure that slot can take either a SATA or NVME SSD.
The specs say "PCIe/NVMe for Solid-state drive", which suggests a SATA SSD would have to be connected to the blue SATA data port on motherboard.
Guess you're going to have to open it up and see where this drive is actually installed. Once we know for certain, then you can take the right steps to image that drive, install the new one, and transfer the image onto it. Unless of course, you want to do a clean install of Windows and all your apps.
Either way, back up all your personal files on external media right before you begin the process, to be protected against losing anything.