Changed Optane to NVMe SSD!

[SteveD3]

I finally got the nerve to take out the 16Gb Optane card that came with my laptop and install a lightning fast 1Tb NVMe SSD. Some advice:

1) Disable Optane in the Intel software first. To be sure it is done, reboot into BIOS and go to System Config/ UEFI Dev. Config and make sure there is no Optane enabled and it sees the hard drive and Optane card as separate.

2) Remove the Optane card and install a PCIe 3.0X4 M.2 NVMe drive. I bought the Samsung SSD 980, not the 980 Pro, which is PCIe 4.0. The 980 has speeds up to 3500 MB/s, but the Optane card was 3.0X2, so the new 3.0X4 SSD will only achieve half its max speed. Not to worry, that is still over 20 times faster than the hard drive, about 1600 MB/s.

3) You will likely need to go into Windows Disk Manager and initialize the drive to see it in file manager. Select GPT partitioning, not MBR! Also, do not make the disk a dynamic disk as you may read somewhere. Format the SSD as NTFS once you see it in file manager.

4) I used the Samsung Data migration tool to move data from existing hard drive...took about a half hour.

5) To boot from the new drive, go into BIOS and go to System Config/ Boot Options/ OS Boot Manager. You should see the new drive and the old drive. Hit F5 until the new SSD is on top. Save and exit BIOS.

6) Upon restart, the new SSD will be the C drive and the old hard disk will still be in the system as a different drive letter. You can reformat is as storage and keep it or remove it once you are sure everything works on the new SSD. If you have a problem, you can always go back into BIOS and boot off the hard disk.

WARNING: I did a BIOS update and my system became unbootable. After hours of trying to get it back, I re-installed the hard disk with Optane and the system booted. I then was able to re-install the SSD. The BIOS update does not go well without that Optane card in, so if you install the NVMe SSD, just leave BIOS alone.