Dell BOSS-S2 Controller Card Low Profile

Dell BOSS-S2 Boot Card — Dedicated Mirrored OS Storage for PowerEdge

The Dell BOSS-S2 boot card is a purpose-built storage controller that separates OS boot storage from application data drives in Dell PowerEdge servers. BOSS stands for Boot Optimised Server Storage. Two M.2 SATA SSDs run in hardware RAID 1 on the card. This provides a fast, redundant boot volume that survives a single SSD failure. All main hot-plug drive bays remain completely available for data workloads.

Without a Dell BOSS-S2 boot card, one or two hot-swap bays are consumed by OS drives in a mirrored configuration. This reduces available data storage capacity. The BOSS-S2 card moves the OS drives to M.2 slots mounted on the controller card itself, recovering those bays for data use.

RAID 1 Mirroring and Live Rebuild

RAID 1 on the Dell BOSS-S2 boot card mirrors OS data across both M.2 SATA SSD slots in real time. If one SSD fails, the server continues booting from the surviving drive without any service interruption. iDRAC9 reports the degraded array and alerts the administrator through the standard hardware fault interface. Replacement and rebuild proceed without a service window — the controller rebuilds the mirror to the new SSD while the server remains operational and in production.

Management Integration

The Dell BOSS-S2 boot card installs in a low-profile PCIe 3.0 x2 slot. It integrates fully with iDRAC9 and Dell OpenManage. RAID health, SSD status indicators and rebuild progress all surface through the same standard management interface used for all other PowerEdge hardware. No additional monitoring software is required.

The Dell BOSS-S2 boot card is stocked by Briggi Tech with nationwide delivery.

Find all Dell server storage components at Briggi Tech or review BOSS-S2 details at Dell.