HP Z Turbo Drive, Quad Pro, N2M99AA

[GKre]

Hi there,
i bought an HP Z Turbo Drive Quad for my workstation.
It works like a charm and bringing up a four time better HD performance.
But i still wonder about the green pads that were included in the package?
Even in the manual there's no info available what they are used for?
I mounted two nvme's, fixed them with the screws and closed the head sink but a no point i was missing a "pad".

Does anybody know what the green pads are used for?

One more question:
Shouldn't it work to setup a RAID I with my old SSD and one NVMe, wait for the mirror to be completed, change the boot order to the new NVMe drive to be taken as boot medium, replace the mirror and clean the SSD???

This way i could be able to clone my old Windows installation without the need to use a program?

[BambiBoomZ · Accepted solution]

GKre,

If the pads are about 1-1.5mm thick and a bit sticky on one side then it may be supposed that they are thermal pads to fill the space between the drives and the heatsink.  A Samsung SM951 512GB AHCI  M.2 on a Lycom DT-120  M.2 to PCIe adatpter includes a finned Copper heatsink sort of strapped to it with thermal pads between the surfaces. NVMe runs hotter than AHCI as well. Consider checking the current running temperatures of the drives and look for areas of contact with the heatsink.

As for cloning to the new drive, the idea of configuring a RAID and then dismounting, sounds very time consuming- potentially many hours during which the system can not be used. Also, it doesn't seem feasible to create a RAID 1 on dissimilar drives of different format.

Consider a program such as EaseUS Partition Master as it is immensely useful to clone, drives, format, set up partitions and etc.  I recently took the z620_2  C: drive, and using (an old 11.9 version of) Partition Master (current is 15.5 or 15.8), changed a 1TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 mech'l HD (2016) from MBR to GPT and active, cloned the ZTurbo M.2 it to the ES.3 mech'l drive, defragged- after two years it was 17% fragmented, cleaned the files and registry with CCleaner,  then cloned it to a HP ZTurbo M.2  Drive for a z420 (replacing a Samsung 860 EVO 500GB SSD) and  again to a Samsung SM951 M.2 AHCI 512GB (on Lycom DT-120 M.2 to PCIe adapter) for z620_2, and am underway revising  two 4TB and one 6TB drives partitions on backup drives. 

The cloned M.2 boot drives drives booted quickly and had strong test results (see below). The Samsung SM951  M.2 512GB AHCI  Passmark Disk Mark of 15506 is the best result over several years.

BambiBoomZ

z620_2: E5-1650 v2 (6C@ 4.4GHz) / z420 Liquid Cooling / 64GB HP DDR3-1866 ECC Reg / GTX 1070 Ti 8GB / Samsung SM951  M.2 512GB AHCI + Samsung 970EVO M.2 500GB NVMe + HP /HGST Enterprise 6TB > HP OEM Windows 7 Prof'l

[ Rating = 6148 / CPU= 15859 / 2D = 787 / 3D = 13077 / Mem = 3045  / Disk = 15506 ]

z420_3: E5-1650 v2 (6C@ 4.3GHz) / z420 Liquid Cooling/ 64GB HP DDR3-1866 ECC Reg / GTX 1060 6GB / HP Z Turbo M.2 256GB AHCI + Samsung 860EVO 500GB+ HGST 7K6000 4TB > HP OEM Windows 7 Prof'l

[ Rating = 5918 / CPU= 15155 / 2D = 780 / 3D = 10932 / Mem = 2925  / Disk = 13469 ]

[GKre]

Well BBZ, i guess it should be mentioned in the manual.
As i am using HP NCVMe's these seem to have a good contact with the heat sink. I will monitor temperature for some time. Currently they are about 30°C.
Regarding the "RAID I"- idea - it did not work as the sector size of the devices were different (512k / 4096k).

I ended up with a backup and fresh install. this was the fastest way.
To be honest i wanted to try different concepts without additional software.

Regarding the speed - my system comes up to 15439 with hp EX950. It's four times faster than the SSD before.
What i really like - the adapter was cheap, is fast and offers two more slots for expansion.

I am very happy with my decision 😉

Thanks a lot to you for your time and valuable comments!

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