Laptop WWAN SSD?

[steved77]

Hello all!
It's been a while since I've been on, it's good to be back.
I have a Dell Latitude 5591 with an M.2 NVME for the main drive and would like to put an SSD in the WWAN slot. Ive seen this done on other Dell models, but Dell says its not supported after the sale to have it installed. im pretty sure the UEFI is the latest available installed. When I install a drive (ive tried several) the laptop will not even boot into the UEFI. It lights the power switch up, then immediately it goes off and thats it. Does anyone know if there is a work around for this that i'm not finding? Dell says an SSD that is PCIe, 2230 246Gb PCIe 3.0x2 should work there, if it was installed from new.
Anyway, thanks for having me back!

 

[r00tcz]

There's a lot of problems like this with locked down notebooks in general. You can't install non-certified WLAN card or WWAN card either. The BIOS checks what's in that slot and unless it's whitelisted, it will refuse to boot. Sometimes you get a message, sometimes you don't.
Only possible workaround I know of is to modify the BIOS, this requires using external programmer because BIOS will block you from doing it from any software.

 

[steved77]

There's a lot of problems like this with locked down notebooks in general. You can't install non-certified WLAN card or WWAN card either. The BIOS checks what's in that slot and unless it's whitelisted, it will refuse to boot. Sometimes you get a message, sometimes you don't.
Only possible workaround I know of is to modify the BIOS, this requires using external programmer because BIOS will block you from doing it from any software.

I was afraid this might be the case. It's no big deal as I don't really need it, but I was just experimenting. Thanks for the reply!

 

[LabRat 891]

It will 'likely' work. If Dell had an SSD option for that slot, the likelihood is extremely high.

Do note, most WWAN slots are M.2 B-key, not M-key. Many smaller NVMe drives are/used to be x2 lane B/M-key.

Not sure how much if any usefulness it has today but, 16GB 3DXPoint Optane M10 2242 B/M-key NVMe modules are pretty dang cheap.
HP, etc. used to put them into laptops (usually, a b-key slot, IIRC) as cache and to try and sell 4GB and 8GB RAM laptops, as 20GB and 24GB
Edit: Funny enough, the platform your laptop runs, is 'fully Optane compatible'