Users Guide
Table Of Contents
- Dell Express Flash NVMe PCIe SSD User’s Guide
- NVMe PCIe SSD overview
- Supported operating systems
- Troubleshooting
- NVMe PCIe SSD carrier LED indicators
- Ungraceful system shutdown or power loss
- General errors
- NVMe drive properties intermittently not available in iDRAC
- NVMe PCIe SSD is not listed in the operating system
- I/O device error on write to NVMe PCIe SSD
- NVMe PCIe SSD performance measurement not optimal
- System becomes unresponsive when NVMe PCIe U.2 2.5-inch SSD is surprise removed
- System becomes unresponsive or fails when NVMe PCIe SSD is inserted
- Related documentation
- Getting help
Hot-plug drive serviceability
PowerEdge 14
th
generation and later servers support hot-plug serviceability for NVMe PCIe U.2 2.5-inch SSD models only.
Hot-plug serviceability allows this device to be added and removed without turning off the server, maximizing server availability
and reducing downtime.
There are two types of hot-plug operations depending on whether you notify the server before you conduct the operation:
● Orderly removal—Performed after notifying the system that the operation is about to take place.
● Surprise insertion and removal—Performed without notifying the system that the operation is about to take place.
CAUTION:
To prevent data loss or corruption during a surprise removal of an NVMe PCIe SSD, ensure that
the data on the drive is no longer in use. Also, do not perform a hot-plug operation while the system is
accessing the system BIOS or HII configuration setup.
CAUTION: Do not remove a non-RAID boot storage device or a swap file storage device from a running server
because the operating system becomes unresponsive.
CAUTION: When removing an NVMe PCIe SSD from your system, ensure that the data on the device is not
critical to the functioning of the system.
Surprise removal is only supported when the NVMe PCIe SSD is installed in a supported Dell system running the following
operating systems:
● Windows Server 2019 and later
● VMware ESXi 7.0 patch release 7.0b, build 16324942 or later, although hot-plug operations are limited to specific
configurations. See NVMe Hot-Plug on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running VMware vSphere or vSAN white paper.
● Linux
○ Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 or later
○ SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP2 or later
○ Ubuntu Server 20.4 or later
For additional Linux requirements, see the NVMe Surprise Removal on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers running Linux operating
systems white paper.
For operating systems or applications that do not support surprise removal of NVMe PCIe U.2 2.5-inch SSDs, Dell EMC
management tools such as OpenManage Server Administrator and Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) provide a
procedure to perform orderly removal of the device. In the OpenManage Server Administrator, go to the Physical Devices
on PCIe SSD subsystem page, select Prepare to Remove from the Tasks list for the selected SSD. For more information,
NVMe PCIe SSD overview
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