PCIe NVMe storage can provide an incredible speed boost to any server but booting from it is not natively supported on some older Dell PowerEdge servers.
11th and 12th generation servers like the Dell PowerEdge R710 and R720 are very popular amongst the home lab community and could benefit from a fast boot device.
This procedure should work on any Dell PowerEdge Server that can boot from a USB device.
Booting from NVMe storage is simple to do. In this post I am going to explain how it’s done and show the benchmarks from both a Dell PowerEdge R310 and T320.
Hardware you will need:
- Two USB Flash drives:
- One to run clover bootloader. I used this tiny Sandisk Ultra Fit Flash Drive.
- One for your bootable Windows ISO.
- A PCI NVMe Adapter and a NVMe Drive:
- I used this cheap NVMe to PCIe adapter from Amazon.
- With a Samsung 970 Evo Plus also from Amazon
I also tested the process on an 1.2Tb Intel DC P3520 PCIe card, which also worked fine.
Software you will need:
- A Windows Server Installation ISO
- Rufus to create the bootable Windows Installation.
- Boot Disk Utility
PCIe NVMe Boot Process
When this procedure is complete, the PowerEdge server will boot from the internal USB storage and run the Clover EFI Bootloader. Clover will contain the NVMe boot driver and boot the installed operating system from the NVMe storage.
If your server has internal SD card storage, you could boot from that instead.
Install the NVMe Adapter and Drive
First install the NVMe adapter and drive into your Dell PowerEdge server. I used this cheap adapter from Amazon and a 500Gb Samsung 970 Evo Plus.
Here is the unit before I installed it into the server without the heatsink applied. It comes with regular and low profile PCIe bracket:
And here is the unit installed in the PowerEdge R310 with the heatsink and thermal pad applied:
Create your bootable Windows Server Installation
The first step is to create your Windows Server Installation USB Stick. There are lots of guides on how to do this but I will show how I did it.
- Download and Install Rufus.
- Point Rufus to your Windows Server ISO.
- Configure Rufus with the following options:
- Partition Scheme: GPT
- Target System: UEFI (non CSM)
Install Windows in the normal way
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.
When Windows setup is complete it will reboot. It will be unable to do because the Dell UEFI does not have any NVMe support. But don’t worry about that!
Setup the Clover EFI USB Boot Stick
Now setup the Clover USB Boot stick or SD Card.
- Download and run Boot Disk Utility.
- Insert the USB Stick that you are going to boot from into your PC.
- Select your USB Stick and click format:
- Open your newly formatted drive and copy \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\off\NvmExpressDxe.efi to:
- \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\BIOS
- \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\UEFI
Copying 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.
My \EFI\CLOVER\drivers\UEFI looks like this:
Insert the Clover USB Flash Drive or SD Card into your server
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:
Ensure your UEFI Boot order is set correctly and pointing to your Clover USB Stick or SD Card:
When booting from the internal Clover USB stick it will briefly display a boot screen:
The clover defaults worked right away for me and I didn’t have to configure anything.
You can modify the config.plist file (which is in the root of the USB Stick) to reduce the timeout if you want to speed things up a little bit:
<key>Boot</key> <dict> <key>#Arguments</key> <string>slide=0 darkwake=0</string> <key>#DefaultLoader</key> <string>boot.efi</string> <key>#LegacyBiosDefaultEntry</key> <integer>0</integer> <key>#XMPDetection</key> <string>-1</string> <key>CustomLogo</key> <false/> <key>Debug</key> <false/> <key>DefaultVolume</key> <string>LastBootedVolume</string> <key>DisableCloverHotkeys</key> <false/> <key>Fast</key> <false/> <key>Legacy</key> <string>PBR</string> <key>NeverDoRecovery</key> <true/> <key>NeverHibernate</key> <false/> <key>RtcHibernateAware</key> <false/> <key>SignatureFixup</key> <false/> <key>SkipHibernateTimeout</key> <false/> <key>StrictHibernate</key> <false/> <key>Timeout</key> <integer>5</integer> </dict>
Modify the “integer” value on line 36 to reduce the boot delay.
Windows should now proceed to boot normally directly from the NVMe drive.
Performance Results
I was really impressed with how much faster both machines PowerEdge are when booting from the NVMe drive. For the purposes of clarity the config of these systems are:
Dell PowerEdge R310
Intel XEON X3470 2.93GHz
16Gb Ram
Dell PERC H700 (512mb)
Dell PowerEdge T320
Intel XEON
32Gb Ram
Dell PERC H710 (1Gb)
Performance of the Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVMe Drive was excellent in both machines. But the drive performance is constrained in the R310 because it has a PCI Gen 2 x 4, whereas the T320 has PCI Gen 3.
Disabling C States in the BIOS increases performance in both machines.
Here are the results from a CrystalDiskMark from the R310 with C States Disabled:
Here are all the results from both machines with and without C States Enabled.
| Test Type | C State | Machine | Read Result (MB/s) | Write Result (MB/s) |
| SEQ1M Q8T1 | Enabled | R310 | 1670.13 | 1636.13 |
| SEQ1M Q8T1 | Disabled | R310 | 1811.27 | 1760.90 |
| SEQ1M Q1T1 | Enabled | R310 | 1359.94 | 1346.70 |
| SEQ1M Q1T1 | Disabled | R310 | 1529.41 | 1498.86 |
| RND4K Q32T16 | Enabled | R310 | 1147.30 | 1351.01 |
| RND4K Q3T16 | Disabled | R310 | 1149.57 | 1346.97 |
| RND4K Q1T1 | Enabled | R310 | 35.95 | 85.65 |
| RND4K Q1T1 | Disabled | R310 | 37.96 | 93.31 |
| SEQ1M Q8T1 | Enabled | R320 | 3339.91 | 3124.31 |
| SEQ1M Q8T1 | Disabled | R320 | 3576.68 | 3265.89 |
| SEQ1M Q1T1 | Enabled | R320 | 2303.26 | 2510.44 |
| SEQ1M Q1T1 | Disabled | R320 | 2421.82 | 2793.11 |
| RND4K Q32T16 | Enabled | R320 | 1150.97 | 1557.42 |
| RND4K Q32T16 | Disabled | R320 | 1145.25 | 1558.19 |
| RND4K Q1T1 | Enabled | R320 | 33.23 | 101.27 |
| RND4K Q1T1 | Disabled | R320 | 43.98 | 111.05 |
As a crude comparison here is the performance of a RAID 0 Array in the R310 comprising 4 x 7,200 RPM SATA Drives:
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:
You can see the performance of the drive being constrained by the SATA2 port, but it still gives good random performance.
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.
Conclusion – is it worth adding NVMe storage to a old Dell PowerEdge?
Given the low cost of both the adapter and Samsung SSD and the huge resulting performance boost, it is certainly worth experimenting.
I can’t say if I would use this setup in production yet, but so far, it seems to work fine. Here is an image of Samsung Magician Drive information:
Jay says
Great article. Could I use this process to get proxmox booting from NVME on R710?
Paulie says
No idea because I have never used Proxmox, but I can try it out for you if you want. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work (with any operating system).
Jay says
I would love to see you try. I’m currently in the process of acquiring the hardware for a R710 freenas server based on proxmox.
Paulie says
Have you already tried?
Jay says
No, the R710 is still in the shipping box. I’ve used the Cloverfield method before on an older server motherboard with mixed results. I’d like to know for sure before I order a PCI-express card and SSD drive.
Paulie says
Tried it, worked fine:
https://ibb.co/kqS83r1
https://ibb.co/85rkHdR
Jay says
Wow, that was fast, thanks! Should any pci-e NVME adaptor work? I’m looking at cards with one NVME and one SATA m.2 connector on one card. Because the R710 pci-e slots do not support bifurcation, I can’t use Gigabyte’s quad NVME adaptor, for instance.
Paulie says
I think it would be ok. Once you have tried it please let me know how it went. You could put a SATA SSD in place of the Optical drive. But the SATA on the PCIe card would be faster.
Jay says
Proxmox isn’t as disk-intensive as its VM’s, so it could live on a SATA SSD in the optical drive bay. Then an NVME in the pci-e slot would be free for VM’s and their operations. In that case I wouldn’t need Clover. Will keep you up to date. This project is backlogged, so it will be a few weeks before I have an update for you. I appreciate your effort with this concept, and especially for sharing it on your blog.
Spencer L says
I followed this guide. Trying to get a R320 setup with Truenas. However using UEFI I’m getting garbled text when i select the PCIe device to boot from. I’ll have to try via BIOS later when I have time to test again.
The Truenas installer gives the option to install with BIOS or UEFI.
I opted to try the UEFI route.
I’ll report back if it’s successful with BIOS instead.
Bayrio says
many thanks for the article. with something difficult to start kiting I got it to work and it works great
Paulie says
@Bayrio – be interested to know what your configuration was. Just interested to hear what machines/configs people have set this up on.
Jay says
Hi Paulie, we chatted earlier about NVME and SATA m.2 drives. I got my R710 setup running with Proxmox 6.3. My storage is based off a dual-slot m.2 PCI-E adaptor card. One slot is m.2 NVME and the other is m.2 SATA which connects to the motherboard SATA from a standard SATA port on the adaptor card. This works GREAT. The R710 detects everything by default with no need for drivers or setup. The m.2 SATA SSD gets its power from the card’s PCI-E slot, which solves the problem of needing a custom SATA power cable for regular 2.5″ SATA SSD’s. Proxmox is booting off the m.2 SATA, so no need for Clover UEFI. The NVME SSD is for Proxmox VM storage and backup. Since the R710 is PCI-E 2.0 based, the NVME SSD is limited to 1000MB/s, but still far faster than any HDD and faster than most HDD RAID setups. The other nice thing about the adaptor card’s SATA slot is that the SATA m.2 uses the 300MB/s bandwidth of the SATA port rather than sharing the PCI-E bus with the NVME drive.
Paulie says
Hey Jay, sounds like a pretty neat setup! Glad you got it all working. The adapter card sounds pretty cool, could you share a link to it please?
Jay says
This is the one I used: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B0773YNB5K. This card has one NVME and one SATA slot. Anyone looking to use other m.2 cards should be warned that cards with multiple NVME slots will only pass one SSD through the R710 8x risers because those configurations require PCI-E bifurcation technology. There is anecdotal evidence that the (super-rare) 16x riser card for the R710 may support bifurcation, and potentially could support a 4-way NVME SSD configuration. However, even in this case the setup wouldn’t make any sense because the PCI-express 2.0 bus bandwidth is severely limited.
Joa says
Very helpful article. Tried to boot VMware ESXi from NVME drive but clover cannot see it at the boot screen. Need any tweaking? TIA!
Jay says
Joa, try booting ESXI from an m.2 SATA SSD with a compatible PCI-E m.2 adaptor. That way Clover is unnecessary. The ESXI OS doesn’t really benefit from NVME speeds anyway. VM’s are a different matter, those should live on NVME drives.
Sean Graham says
This is fantastic, thank you! It will bring new life to our server. Worked perfectly.
Paulie says
It certainly does provide a really big boost in performance – well worth the low cost upgrade for massive performance increase. Quite a nice way of lowering power consumption too.
Mohammad Johan Rajabi says
I tried nvme on dell r620, pcie card use orico and ssd xpg sx8200 pro.
This nvme no detect on bios or my linux system, can you help me, what should I do?
Thanks
milosz berlik says
is there posibility to make raid with 3 disk