BOSS Controller Cards

Dell BOSS (Boot Optimized Storage Solution) Controller Cards

Dell BOSS (Boot Optimized Storage Solution) controller cards provide a dedicated M.2 SSD boot solution for Dell PowerEdge servers, keeping the OS boot drives separate from the data storage backplane. A BOSS card installs in a PCIe slot (or Dell's dedicated BOSS slot on newer models) and supports up to two M.2 SSDs, presenting them as a RAID-1 mirrored boot volume, so the OS gets redundant storage without consuming a hot-swap drive bay.

The BOSS-S1 and BOSS-S2 each support up to two 6Gbps M.2 SATA SSDs in RAID 1; the BOSS-S2 adds M.2 hot-plug and drive activity LEDs, while the BOSS-S1 card has no status LEDs. The BOSS-N1 uses up to two 80mm NVMe M.2 SSDs on a PCIe Gen3 x4 host interface. Dell documents BOSS-S1 support across 14th gen PowerEdge (R640, R740, R740xd, R440, R540, R940, T440, T640) and 15th gen (R650, R750, R6515, R7515, R6525, R7525), plus a separate modular card for blade and MX chassis; BOSS-S2 on R650, R750, R6525 and R7525; and BOSS-N1 on 16th gen R660 and R760.