I bought a PCIe 4 adapter and a Western Digital WD_BLACK 1TB SN770 NVMe Internal Gaming SSD Solid State Drive - Gen4 PCIe, M.2 2280, Up to 5,150 MB/s - WDS100T3X0E for Dell Precision T7500 workstation to prepare a Ubuntu for Da-Yi.
Finally got a chance to put everything together.
I first try to place the PCIe in slot 4 (PCIe 2 x16) but the system couldn't find a boot disk. Checked on the technical guide (
https://i.dell.com/sites/content/busine ... -Guide.pdf) and found the 2 PCIe2 x 16 slots are for graphic cards.
The T7500 also 2 native Gen 2 PCIe x16 graphics slots each capable of driving graphics cards
up to 225W (plus 3 additional x16 slots - 2 wired as x8, 1 wired as x4) plus 2 legacy slots PCI
and PCI-X.
All PCI-e slots are Gen 2.
Then, I swap it to x8 slot (slot 3) and tested again and the system was able to find the disk and Ubuntu started installation successfully.
However, the BIOS does not have an option to boot from NVME SSD! Posts online indicated UEFI is needed to get NVME SSD on PCIe to boot. Dell Precision T7500's latest BIOS version is A.18 dated in November 2018. There's no more BIOS update for T7500.
That means, I can install OS on the NVME SSD but I cannot boot it. It is useless then.....
I guess I will need to use a SATA 3 SSD as a boot disk.
I also bought a Wi-Fi dongle (TP-Link USB WiFi Adapter for PC(TL-WN725N), N150 Wireless Network Adapter for Desktop - Nano Size WiFi Dongle for Windows 11/10/7/8/8.1/XP/ Mac OS 10.9-10.15 Linux Kernel 2.6.18-4.4.3, 2.4GHz Only) and tested it. It worked as stated for 2.4 GHz only but should be good or now.