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Latitude 5310: SATA Drive Replacement?
Hi everyone. Can anybody tell me if the Latitude 5310 supports M.2 drives with a SATA interface? In particular, would the SATA password locking option show up in BIOS? Also, would OPAL be supported with an SED variant of such a drive? The 5310 version I'm eyeing comes with a 256GB M.2 NVMe drive.
Cheers.
ejn63
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January 11th, 2021 09:00
Most newer (2020-2021) M.2 systems no longer support SATA. The manual for your system mentions only NVMe, which means that is just about certainly the case for the 5310.
There is no mention of OPAL support in the manual for your system, but there is this:
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000126855/dell-encryption-enterprise-personal-self-encrypting-drive-manager-dell-data-protection-self-encrypting-drive-manager-hardware-system-requirements
pluriel
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January 12th, 2021 09:00
Yes, the lack of mention of SATA in the manual struck me too. There it is, I guess - bye bye SATA. I've been ambivalent about OPAL since it precludes being able to transfer disk images to a new disk and reactivate it, which defeats the purpose of disk imaging.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts, ejn63. Cheers.
pluriel
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January 21st, 2021 03:00
Well, on a lark, I decided to open up my new Latitude 5310 and plug in my old Crucial MX300 M.2 SATA drive and, lo and behold, it was indeed recognized by the system. Also, the SATA password option showed up in the BIOS setup screen. The option to enable/disable both M.2 PCIe and SATA drives under System Configuration -> Drives was the clue. Screenshots as follows:
I did not take the time to see if the SED feature of the drive is supported by this system, although it used to work on my Inspiron 7577. This being a business laptop it should certainly also support this feature.
I do not trust the info given in Dell manuals these days - it's often incomplete or inaccurate.
Cheers.