Well, the drive is working fine on the Flexbay backplane in one of the standard caddies, they work for U.2 just like they work for SATA. Same connector in the same exact place.. I gave up trying to use the passive MiniSAS to U.2 cable. Seems the MiniSAS ports on the 5820 go through the Intel Volume Management Device controller in the CPU and C422 chipset. Turning off the Intel VMD option in the bios AND (seems important) unchecking the dots by both PCIe drive devices allows the U.2 drive to appear as a standard NVMe drive to Windows. Otherwise it seems to be considered a RAID device. Windows did see the drive in that config, but other than hot swapping I don't see any advantage in doing that with just one drive. But it seems it needs the logic/electronics on the Flexbay backplane to work, the standard, passive MiniSAS to U.2 cable did not work. The bios nor Windows ever detected the drive using that cable. Standard NVMe is not hot swappable and thus not well suited to the Flexbay caddies. But the onboard MiniSAS and the Flexbay backplane should allow for hotswapping I think?So, I bough this. It will take a while to arrive, but I hope I can use it with the standard MiniSAS to U.2 cables I have and put the U.2 drive in the 5.25 bay. Then I can use all 4 Flexbay caddies for a SATA array down the line.[URL] anyone is looking for the NVMe Flexbay backplane at a very low price, PM me and I'll share where I got mine. Not sure if it's ok to link to non Dell (Amazon in this case) sellers of Dell parts here on the public forum.
I have a Dell 5820 that's been booting off a SATA ssd in one of the 3.5" caddies. Rather than going through all the extra parts needed to put an M.2 NVMe drive in one of the 3.5" external bays I bought a U.2 2.5" drive, 5.25" to 2.5" drive adapter and an U.2 cable. I put the cable on the first (0) MiniSAS port on the motherboard, plugged that into the drive and plugged the only available SATA power I could find into the power plug on the drive end of the cable. BIOS looks just like it did before I installed anything. MiniSAS PCIe SSD-0 and 1 are both checked to be enabled, but both show Device ID = (none).Is there some trick with this? Is there something magical about the NVMe backplane for the 3.5 bays? Tell me I'm missing something easy here and that I don't have a dead U.2 drive or that the motherboard wasn't made to be used with simple, 2.5" U.2 ssds not connected through the NMVe backplane?
2.5" U.2 SSD not recognized in BIOS??