HP EliteDesk 800 G1 - SSD Compatibility

[Queiroz-JD · Accepted solution]

Finally, I'm back, and with great news: my HP 800 EliteDesk 800 G1 is fully functional.

After lots of struggle, I finally realized that a BIOS-based boot manager would never be capable of booting a SO in a device that wasn't recognized. Keeping this on mind, I started searching and found rEFInd [content removed].

Thanks a lot to all of you who lent me some of your time to help with the solution.

[DGroves]

there is a project that combines refind and duet together

https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/guide-nvme-boot-for-systems-with-legacy-bios-and-uefi-board-duet-r...

[SDH]

For others with a HP EliteDesk 800 G1 mini:

Note that the one thing he never did was to get a HP AHCI-controller M.2 stick. This could be either the HP XP941 (which is officially listed as a part for his mini in its technical/service manual) or a HP SM951 AHCI-controller (which is better/faster technology, and which also would work). If you know the HP Assembly and Spares part numbers those are pretty easy to find used on eBay. It also helps to know their official Samsung model/part numbers. I've bought about 4 of the HP 512GB SM951 versions from eBay recently, roughly for $60.00 USD each with careful shopping.

Just so you know, these Samsung XP941/SM951 AHCI-controller sticks are built using enterprise grade MLC NAND chips with 1.5 million hours MTBF (so I don't blink a bit if I happen to get one with 30k hours on it). Here's some info from a Samsung brochure on the XP941 which is also attached below. The SM951 can instead use the speed of a PCIe Gen3 interface with full bandwidth across x4 lanes of the PCIe bus:

[Queiroz-JD]

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@SDH wrote:

For others with a HP EliteDesk 800 G1 mini:

Note that the one thing he never did was to get a HP AHCI-controller M.2 stick.

Are you saying that BIOS would recognize these sticks?

[DGroves]

yes, these SSD's use a PCI-E based AHCI controller which is based off of the SATA spec  not NVME as such the bios/chipset will be able to boot from it

and since your system has a SATA M.2 x4 ssd slot no pci-e card is required

this applies to almost any system, not just to your system

just make sure to get the AHCI based sm951 not the nvme based sm951 by reading the  model name carefully

The AHCI version carries the code MZ-HPVxxx0 (where xxx is the capacity in gigabytes),

whereas the NVMe version is called MZ-VPVxxx0. 

[SDH]

Yes your mini's BIOS will recognize those two types of AHCI-controller sticks, and there is an eBay ad currently that has an OBO option for its 70.00 Buy It Now price. I needed a HP 256GB SM951 AHCI-controller for a little experiment, and tried 40.00, and it was auto-accepted instantly, free shipping. You can find it if you search for MZ-HPV2560 and look for the 70.00 price, and do the OBO from there.