Booting to NVMe ON Z820 HP AND Z600

[Ro808]

The marketing hype (wrt specs) is something I am fully aware of, in fact it's my background.

I've been looking at the Intels and the Samsung SM/PM drives, but it's hardly beneficial to buy used because of the increased competition from the latest M.2s of WD, ADATA ao. I can buy a 970 Evo Plus 500GB in a sealed box for €80. You won't find many NVMe M.2s at prices < €50 on the used market.

Unless one primarily deals with very large files, for most users any NVMe M.2 SSD will probably be fast enough, 98% of the time.

[DGroves]

you can find both the intel 750 series and samsung enterprise ssd's on amazon/newegg and other resellers as "NOS" new old stock both are "MLC" based drives and depending on your data usage patterns might be worth considering

i have mentioned numerous times in previous posts that i do not recommend most users buy ssd's off ebay as the common ones listed there are not good deals compared to the major online retailers

[Ro808]

Does anybody have experience  with the Samsung PM981a (MZVLB512HAJQ-00000)?

This is the successor to the PM981 and basically an OEM version of the 970 Evo Plus.

[DGroves]

without you specifically stating just what you are looking for, all i can tell you is that for all practical purposes both ssd revisions are the same from a user perspective nothing much was changed, the controller is still a polaris based controller using TLC nand and the speed specs between both are the same

https://gzhls.at/blob/ldb/4/b/7/f/63615517d004b8ee7452f4f76469c7129df9.pdf 

[Ro808]

The 981a that I ordered is actually a HP oem version, but that's irrelevant in this case. It's the cheapest 512 GB NVMe I could find.

I'm contemplating a dual boot (Win 10 + MacOS) by using another m.2 and a dual m.2 pcie adapter.

DGroves, do you have experience with such (or similar dual boot) configurations? Specifically regarding 2 operating systems, each installed on a dedicated ssd, but mounted on a dual m.2 PCIe adapter (I'll manage the MacOS part ;-)).

Your replies are much appreciated.

[DGroves]

the issue with all dualboots which include windows is that the MS boot manager is very limited as such to dual boot windows and another OS you must use a different boot manager such as grub and this becomes much harder when you also have to use a second boot manager/emulator to load the mac OS

i sidestep these issues myself by using vmware workstation patched to work with the latest mac OS as my mac needs are very modest

check/ask on the tonymacx86.com website

https://www.tonymacx86.com/

[Ro808]

It's known that a dual boot system is more prone to all kinds of boot issues, especially if it's a Hackintosh and probably even more if Windows and macOS are supposed to boot from the same PCIe slot. I'll have to look into this in more detail.

Some years ago I managed to boot macOS on my XW6600, but encoutered too many problems afterwards. The HP Z-series are much easier to convert into a Hackintosh, because these have a lot in common with the Nehalem/Westmere Mac Pros. 

It appears, I made a good deal on the Samsung 981a (less than 20% of the attached retail price).