[SOLVED] Dell Precision T5400 - SSD help...

[sloppyjoey]

I have an old T5400 that I'm trying to revive to a fairly decent spec daily runner, just doing Illustrator and Photoshop work. Don't have full specs to hand (will add to this post later) but just looking for some advice.

I purchased a Kingston UV500 SSD hoping for a decent boost in performance, boot times, etc., to start with - figured that's a nice straight forward cost-effective upgrade to start with?

Last time I tinkered with hardware, SSDs were fairly new and just connected via SATA. But have read lots of info lately (and tried to educate myself) about PCIe, M.2 and NVMe coming into play with SSDs.

So am looking for information on whether or not I can mount my particular SSD in the PCIe slot of the T5400? If so, how (with an adapter I guess, but any key specs to look for)? And will it be straight forward enough to boot from it (Windows 10), or only with certain patches/hacks first? ...or am I just best to stick with SATA connections in this instance - from what I can see, this machine has SATA II connections right? So probably get about 300Mb/s out of the SSD perhaps...? Whereas hoping the PCIe connection might give me the full 500Mb/s as advertised with this drive...

 

[jay32267]

That is a SATA drive so you need to stick with SATA.

 

[william p]

If the adapter card has a BIOS so It's bootable I think it should work. Those came with SATA,SAS, and had native RAID support. So booting from an adapter card should be OK.
Here's a T5400 at userbenchmark running NVMe and the performance is there.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/12071291
Here are others for comparison.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/Dell-Precision-WorkStation-T5500/78

 

[sloppyjoey]

That is a SATA drive so you need to stick with SATA.

Cheers for taking the time to reply - albeit with a pretty blunt answer. What's the deal with all these adapter cards if I should be sticking with SATA? Or are you saying that because the T5400 wouldn't be compatible with anything other than SATA?

 

[jay32267]

The way I'm seeing this... I'm pretty certain that the adapter cards allow you to use an NVMe style drive if you don't have an M2 slot, and being you don't have an NVMe style drive, the adapter card isn't going to do you much good....which is why I said to stick with a SATA connection to the drive.

 

[sloppyjoey]

If the adapter card has a BIOS so It's bootable I think it should work. Those came with SATA,SAS, and had native RAID support. So booting from an adapter card should be OK.
Here's a T5400 at userbenchmark running NVMe and the performance is there.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/12071291
Here are others for comparison.
https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/Dell-Precision-WorkStation-T5500/78

Thanks for this info. Those links were to T5500 though which I think offers more recent BIOS updates, but nevertheless good info. I've also got a T5500 kicking about to possibly upgrade too, so nice to see NVMe as an option on that!

It's only because I've already purchased the Kingston UV500 SSD for the T5400, that I was looking to maximise it's potential. Currently I'm not getting great read/write benchmarks from it, so keen to learn about out what options I have.

 

[william p]

Sorry here's a T5400 NVMe
https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/7673898
And here are the other T5400s
https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/Dell-Precision-WorkStation-T5400/3763
I'm not sure what interface he's running through, but it loooks like SATA2 RAID 0 SSDs might equal that.