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Go to SolutionAurora R7, installing second SSD for Oculus Rift usage
Hello,
I'm totally a newbie to working with Alienware hardware. So I just bought Oculus and am aware it uses a lot of memory so I went ahead and bought a second SSD. As with most, there are two SSD drive one is a small 14g and a larger 1TB that I use for my OS. I've not looked at the inside of my desktop. Can anyone assist in installing: XPG GAMMIX 1TB S11 Pro 3D NAND PCIe NVMe Gen3x4 M.2 2280 SSD (AGAMMIXS11P-1TT-C)? I'm already thinking I may have bought the wrong SSD, my attraction to it was the 3D NAND. Since I will only be using it for gaming is there anything specific I should know? I'm not going to pay for someone to do it, and I'm not shy to dig in I just want to be sure that I'm doing the right installation and inserting it in the proper slot.
Something like this: https://www.amazon.com/Adapter-advanced-solution-Controller-Expansion/dp/B07JKH5VTL/
Also, since you say your boot drive is 14G - if your current m2 drive is 16G (there's no such thing as a 14G m2 drive), and has "intel optane" written on it, then you'd be better off disabling optane, turning off RAID, and bifurcating the two drives in your system. Then toss the 16G drive, and instal windows on your m2 nvme drive. The optane drive is just an accelerator for the 3.5" spinner (your OS is actually installed on the 3.5" SATA drive in this scenario), not nearly as good as installing your OS on an nvme boot drive.
This is my best possible solution. My OS is already installed on a SATA HDD so I don't need to go through the horrible process of reinstalling Windows and all of my apps, that's hours of work for me. If I can remove the 16 GIGS and slide it into that slot that's perfect. I only bought it to use with Occulus Rift and gaming. I need to figure out how to turn off RAID which I'm sure is an easy process but I have absolutely no clue about bifurcation.
You only lose half your speed if you have an R10, and plug the adapter into the third PCiE slot. For whatever reason, the B550a board that Dell uses for the R10 only powers half the PCiE lanes supplied to that slot.
The R7, 8 and 9 use the z370 board, that does not cut speed for the second and third PCiE slots.
I have an R7 and can confirm that you do not lose any speed with the adapter. I have 3 NVMe drives, here are my benchmarks:
Here's a video from Intel on disabling the Optane drive, which you need to do before removing the drive. It's a short and easy process.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000024626/memory-and-storage.html
You'd lose more speed with the SATA drive as a boot drive, and the nvme as the storage. It's actually not to hard to switch the boot drives.
1. Plug in the new m2 nvme drive into the m2 slot, and keep your 3.5" boot drive plug in as well, load to windows.
2. Install Macrium Reflect free edition (https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree) and use it to "clone" your boot drive (not image it), to the new nvme SSD. It will take about 10 minutes and you can listen to music in the meantime.
3. When finished, turn off the PC and unplug your 3.5" boot drive. Then restart with just the m2 drive plugged in and verify it boots to windows.
That being said, if a glitch does occur, you still have your 3.5" boot drive and can go back to how you had it, no problems. Usually, the preferred approach is to do a clean install to the new drive, so you can lose all the Dell bloatware and start clean (e.g., no Intel RST, which is used for Optane). But the cloning option is designed for this purpose and works pretty good for a quick fix.
r72019
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Posted July 15th, 2020 21:00
Yeah, the only catch is you need to buy an adapter to use more than one M2 drive.