Start a Conversation

Unsolved

P

1 Rookie

 • 

27 Posts

32

August 19th, 2025 16:40

Cheap way of adding NVMe to 5820

I've got three 5820 workstations that I acquired second-hand after businesses leases expired and they moved them on.

The first two I bought (Xeon W-2235 & W-2265 CPUs) had SATA flexbays, I wanted NVMe so I upgraded them with Dell Ultraspeed quad cards which worked perfectly and I was quite happy with the performance - even if they are working at PCIe Gen3 speeds it's still a lot faster than SATA. Downside was that, even at eBay prices, they weren't particularly cheap.

I recently obtained the third 5820 (with a W-2145 CPU) as a replacement for my son's terminally ill Precision T7500. Again, it had SATA flexbays but I didn't want to spend too much on upgrading it to NVMe - he's a digital artist so a single bootable NVMe for OS & Software would be sufficient and SATA would serve for storing finished artwork (plus a backup to external drives / cloud storage).

I decided to try one of the Sabrent toolless M.2 NVMe to PCIe cards, they need a x4 slot and only hold a single NVMe drive but they're cheap. With offers, they're only £17 here in the UK (or $18 in the US) from Amazon (so I could easily send it back if it didn't work)

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CQZ6SYD1?th=1

I'm pleased to say that it works perfectly, I fitted a 1TB Crucial T500, plugged it into the x4 PCIe slot, booted from USB, and it was immediately visible to the Windows 11 installer (BIOS was set to AHCI).

So if anyone wants a cheap NVMe adapter from a recognised name, you'd do worse than looking at one of these.

1 Rookie

 • 

4 Posts

August 20th, 2025 19:50

You are correct, they work great. I've used some of the very cheap dual NVME cards and it also worked fine. One caveat, if you are hoping to RAID the NVME drives you typically need one of the officially supported Dell cards for that. 

No Events found!

Top