![]() ![]() Conclusion – is it worth adding NVMe storage to a old Dell PowerEdge? If you are using VMWare then you can just access the NVMe drive in the normal way if you are booting from a different storage device such as SD Card or USB Stick. You can see the performance of the drive being constrained by the SATA2 port, but it still gives good random performance. This R310 server also has a Samsung 860 EVO SSD in the DVD Drive bay, which is connected via a SATA 2 port on the motherboard: Here are all the results from both machines with and without C States Enabled.Īs a crude comparison here is the performance of a RAID 0 Array in the R310 comprising 4 x 7,200 RPM SATA Drives: Here are the results from a CrystalDiskMark from the R310 with C States Disabled: But the drive performance is constrained in the R310 because it has a PCI Gen 2 x 4.ĭisabling C States in the BIOS increases performance a little bit. Performance of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe Drive is excellent. For the purposes of clarity the config of this system is: I was really impressed with the performance improvement when booting from the NVMe drive. Windows should now proceed to boot normally directly from the NVMe drive. Modify the “integer” value on line 36 to reduce the boot delay. You can modify the ist file (which is in the root of the USB Stick) to reduce the timeout if you want to speed things up a little bit: Boot The clover defaults worked right away for me and I didn’t have to configure anything. When booting from the internal Clover USB stick it will briefly display a boot screen: Next simply insert the USB flash drive or SD Card into your server and set the UEFI boot order on the server to boot from it:Įnsure your UEFI Boot order is set correctly and pointing to your Clover USB Stick or SD Card: My \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\UEFI looks like this: Insert the Clover USB Flash Drive or SD Card into your server Open your newly formatted drive and copy \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\off\NvmExpressDxe.efi to:Ĭopying the NvmExpressDxe.efi to the drivers folder adds NVMe support to Clover which will enable booting from the Windows Installation that has just been completed.Select your USB Stick and click format:.Insert the USB Stick that you are going to boot from into your PC.Now setup the Clover USB Boot stick or SD Card. But don’t worry about that! Setup the Clover EFI USB Boot Stick It will be unable to do because the Dell UEFI does not have any NVMe support. When Windows setup is complete it will reboot. Windows Server 2012 R2 and newer have Microsoft NVMe drivers built in, so it will see the NVMe storage and offer to install to that location. Configure Rufus with the following options:.Point Rufus to your Windows Server ISO.There are lots of guides on how to do this but I will show how I did it. The first step is to create your Windows Server Installation USB Stick. It comes with regular and low profile PCIe bracket:Īnd here is the unit installed in the PowerEdge R310 with the heatsink and thermal pad applied: Create your bootable Windows Server Installation Here is the unit before I installed it into the server without the heatsink applied. I used this cheap adapter from Amazon and a 500Gb Samsung 970 Evo Plus. Install the NVMe Adapter and Driveįirst install the NVMe adapter and drive into your Dell PowerEdge server. If your server has internal SD card storage, you could boot from that instead. Clover will contain the NVMe boot driver and boot the installed operating system from the NVMe storage. When this procedure is complete, the PowerEdge server will boot from the internal USB storage and run the Clover EFI Bootloader. ![]() ![]() Rufus to create the bootable Windows Installation.I also tested the process on an 1.2Tb Intel DC P3520 PCIe card, which also worked fine. With a Samsung 970 Evo Plus also from Amazon.I used this cheap NVMe to PCIe adapter from Amazon.I used this tiny Sandisk Ultra Fit Flash Drive. In this post I am going to explain how it’s done and show the benchmarks from a Dell PowerEdge R310. This procedure should work on any Dell PowerEdge Server that can boot from a USB device.īooting from NVMe storage is simple to do. Simply update the firmware on your machine. So if you have a 12th generation server do not follow this guide. ![]() PCIe NVMe storage can provide an incredible speed boost to any server but booting from it is not natively supported on 11th generation Dell PowerEdge servers.ġ1th generation servers like the are very popular amongst the home lab community and could benefit from a fast boot device.ġ2th Generation servers such as the R720 support booting from NVMe devices if the latest firmware updates have been applied. ![]()
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