RST will not recognize second NVMe M.2 drive

[BP-PA]

I have a Dell 3450 that came with one NVMe M.2 drive in a socket on the motherboard. I added an identical drive to another socket and selected RAID in the BIOS. 

I downloaded the RST driver from the Dell website specifically for my 3450 machine.

I formatted the second drive with Disk Manager and it appears with drive letter D in Windows Explorer.

Only the original drive is identified in RST. I tried the Storage Spaces utility within Windows and it also will not identify the D drive.

I can write and read files to the D drive.

How can I get RST to identify my new drive? I want to create a RAID 1 array.

[JeanetteC_Intel]

Hello BP-PA,

Thank you for posting in Intel Communities.

To be able to provide an effective recommendation, please share the exact Dell 3450 system that you have. I tried looking up and I found these:

• DELL Latitude 3450 and DELL Vostro 3450however these are laptop devices)
• DELL Precision 3450 Small Form Factor

I will wait for your reply.

Best regards,

JeanetteC.

Intel® Customer Support Technician

[BP-PA]

I have the DELL Precision 3450 Small Form Factor.

Thanks,

Bill

[JeanetteC_Intel]

Hello BP-PA,

Thank you for the confirmation. Kindly give me time to check on this internally and you may expect an update once available.

Best regards,

JeanetteC.

Intel® Customer Support Technician

[JeanetteC_Intel]

Hello BP-PA,

Please be advised that this is still currently being further checked and would need the following detail from you:

1) Please share the exact models of the NVMe drives you are using. The specification page does not show the brand of drives pre-installed on this system model. *You may have to check this with your system manufacturer support team.

I will wait for your reply.

Best regards,

JeanetteC.

Intel® Customer Support Technician

[BP-PA]

The drives are identical and are:

Micron 2300 NVMe 512GB SSD M.2 2280 Model MTFDHBA512TDV.

See the attached picture.

[JeanetteC_Intel]

Hello BP-PA,

Thank you for sharing the detail(s) I requested. I will proceed with checking on this further and will post an update once it is available.

Best regards,

JeanetteC.

Intel® Customer Support Technician

[JeanetteC_Intel]

Hello BP-PA,

Can you please share the exact model of the processor used in parallel, so I may proceed in simulating the issue? I hope to hear from you soon.

Best regards,

JeanetteC.

Intel® Customer Support Technician

[BP-PA]

The processor is:

11th Gen Intel Core i7-11700 @ 2.50 GHz ,2496 Mhz, 8 Cores 16 Logical Processors

BIOS Version, Date Dell, Inc. 1.31.0, 12/11/2024

[JeanetteC_Intel]

Hello BP-PA,

Thank you for sharing. I'll proceed with further checking on this internally and will post back once update I have an update.

Best regards,

JeanetteC.

Intel Customer Support Technician

[BP-PA]

Jeanette,

Are you still working on this for me?

Bill

[Ernesto_C_Intel1]

Hi @BP-PA, 

Apologies for the delayed response. I'm contacting you on behalf of my technician. Rest assured that we are working diligently to address the NVMe issue. 

I'll update you as soon as possible.

Regards, 

Ernesto C.

Intel Customer Support Engineer

[BP-PA]

Ernesto,

Dell told me that my model (Precision 3450) does not support RAID with M.2 NVMe drives. It only supports RAID with SATA connections.

This is very confusing since there are (3) M.2 sockets on the motherboard and there is a RAID option in the BIOS. They really had to go out of their way to prevent RAID functionality from being available.

Bill

[n_scott_pearson · Accepted solution]

Older RST systems, if they support NVMe SSDs at all, will only do so if the NVMe SSDs are connected to the chipset (i.e. the M.2 sockets that utilize PCIe lanes downstream of (generated by) the PCH component). Presuming that the system was shipped with the NVMe SSD in the one M.2 connector that utilizes processor PCIe lanes, try testing with the NVMe SSDs in other two M.2 connectors.

Hope this helps,

...S

[BP-PA]

Scott,

That worked!

I put the two NVMe drives into the other 2 M.2 sockets and now both drives are recognized! The motherboard has slots 0, 1, and 2.

Dell shipped the computer with one drive in slot 2. Moving it to slot 1 and adding another drive to slot 2 did the trick.

Thanks very much for your help!

Bill

[n_scott_pearson]

Great to hear! Let me know how your RAID setup goes...

...S

[Ernesto_C_Intel1]

Hi BP-PA, 

Glad to know that the issue has been resolved with the help of @n_scott_pearson. 

I'll proceed to close this case now. Feel Free to contact us if you have any questions. 

Regards, 

Ernesto C. 

Intel Customer Support Engineer