So you bought a Dell T140 and find you have no space for drives for your operating system. Then you find out about the Dell BOSS cards and you came here to find out if it works with your Dell T140.
Next you want to know what drives does it support. Keep on reading on to find out!
Yes, the Dell 403-BBVQ works prefectly fine with the Dell T140. BIOS detects it without problem and naturally so does iDrac.
At least Dell put the compatibility clearly in their User guide.
What they didn't clearly put is all the M2 drives that are compatible with it, it only lists these if you look at their guide.
| DRIVE MODEL | CAPACITY |
|---|---|
| Intel M.2 S4510 | 240 GB, 480 GB |
| Micron M.2 5100 | 240 GB, 480 GB |
| Micron M.2 5300 | 240 GB, 480 GB |
If you were to look for these drives, you will find you can hardly find them anymore.
So what does work with it?
You have to keep in mind there are different types of M.2 SSD's but they are not all the same.
The Dell 403-BBVQ only supports M.2 sticks that use the SATA interface and not the newer kinds that talk using PCI-E.
Personally I used the WD Red SA500 M.2 500GB drives and they work great and installed Windows Server on it fine.
Even though Dell doesn't specifically specifies this, but I believe all M.2. drives with the SATA interface work with this card.
For some reason this information is really hard to find online, mayby because not many people buy these cards?
Update 25-2-2022:
Well, here's a nice update. Even though the WD RED SA500 M.2. drives work with BOSS cards, it will always report back something like the following in iDRAC:
The Write Endurance of Solid state drive (SSD) Disk 0 on AHCI Controller in slot 2 is less than the threshold value of 'Remaining Write Rated Endurance'.
From what i've gathered this mostly has to do with drives that are not supported that do not a specific piece inside the firmware to report back the correct value.
I like to believe any M.2. drives work with the BOSS card, it's just this warning you get. I guess it's nice to know the value so you can pre-emptively buy a new SSD before it actually fails, but personally I can live with it as I bought 2 and configured it as RAID 1 and most shops have next day delivery so this is fine for me.