HP Z Turbo Quad Pro in Z820

[TechEngineerGR]

Hi guys,

has anyone tried the HP Z Turbo Quad Pro in the Z820? I'm not interested in booting from it, I just need to know if after booting from an SSD drive, my operating system can detect all four NVME drives on the card as four individual drives, so that I can run software RAID5 on them for data.

I've seen reports that the card does work for non-booting purposes but only 1 drive appears, but no reports if that is in the BIOS or in the OS or if anyone has actually tried more than 1 drives in the card.

Thank you!

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

there are many 3rd party 4 slot M.2 carrier cards available to buy on ebay which will work in a z820

the turboz quad card is model specific and depends on the  zx40 unique pci-e signals that hp implemented on unused PCI-e pins of slots 1 and 6 of the z840 along with custom bios support

this question has been asked before on this forum and has allready been answered.

you might want to try using the "search" box/button to see if your question as been asked/answered before posting in the future 

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/HP-Z-Turbo-Quad-Pr...

[TechEngineerGR]

Thank you for your answer, if you read my post carefully and search through the forum, you will see that everyone wanted this as a boot drive, which is not an issue in my configuration. There was only one instance of a user saying his drive would work but would only detect one drive; hence my question. I really like the form factor and the fact that the Quad has both a heatsink and fan, which is why I was sold on the idea.

I will look for a third part card instead.

[DGroves]

when i answer a question, i try to frame my reply so that others reading this post might also get information they are looking for as such parts of the information included not apply to you and you can skip over them

[BambiBoomZ]

TechEngineerGR,

There is a way to use a quad M.2 as a RAID in an HP z820.  The problem with a typical multiple M.2 configuration is of course that the I/O is through a single PCIE slot.  The solution is to use an LSI or similar PCIe SATA/SAS RAID card to provide at least 4X SATAIII SATA outputs, then mount the four M.2 drives in a suitable mounting, for example:

https://www.startech.com/HDD/Brackets/4-M2-SATA-mounting-adapter~35S24M2NGFF

There are then four individual drive connections so as to enable RAID configuration. 

The RAID card could of course run other RAIDs employing many SAS drives

Or, a solution that mounts the drives - still SATA, but sitting in the PCIe slots:

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA8RU3JJ9728&cm_re=quad_m.2_adapter-_-9SIA8RU3JJ9...

Which drives are compatible and whether this solution supports the full potenital speeds of the drives are additional questions.  The performance will be limited to SATA III and one may as well use a conventional 2.5" SSD.

I can see a way to do this with full performance, but can not find any existing hardware.

BambiBoomZ

[DGroves]

I looked into BambiBoomZ's  suguestion  about raiding 4 SSD's via a SAS/SATA raid card and found that for most home and small office users it's not really worth doing (if doing 2 SSD's in raid-0  his suguestion is well worth considering!!!)

the main issue is cost and also if if you have a older system with PCI-e 2.0 bus,

older afordable SAS/SATA cards are usually pci-e 2.0 bus and have older ROC chips (Raid On A Chip) these older cards are limited by the cards chipset in their max bandwidth and while some may work well as a dual raid-0 ssd, using  4  SAS ssd's in raid-0 the card will not  be able to keep up, limiting the speed of the ssd array. and if using SATA interface, then the interface itself is the bottleneck limiting the max speeds to around 550mbps

if you step up to a system with a pci-e 3.0 bus and a current SAS/SATA card that does not use a ROC chip, but is a full blown raid card with onboard cache you now have a setup that can keep up with a 4 drive SSD raid-0 but the cost of such a card is  over 400.00 retail, and these cards are usually PCI-e x8 not pci-e x4 so making sure you have a available slot is also a issue

it might be better to use two dual PCI-e nvme  M.2 cards in a system for most users as this should be cheaper.

 many newer motherboards can be found with 2 or even 3 M.2 slots on the board and depending on how the MB maker setup the M.2 slots you may have a very fast or a so so speed array so if considering a 3/4 drive array do your homework before deciding which way do go

[BambiBoomZ]

DGroves,

I agree that the quad RAID is problematic, expensive, and perhaps unnecessary.

In my view, a quad M.2 RAID configuration in a large capacity server seems reasonable, but in a workstation, a RAID 0 on the OS/Programs drive for performance and a RAID 1 on the storage drives seems more appropriate.

This is only partly a cost consideration as in some users require the highest performance regardless of the complication and cost.  The problem is that if there's problem a RAID 5 might take a more than a day to rebuild  and all the accumulated performance advantage is lost- and more.  We have an ancient SATAII server and rebuilding the RAID 1 on 146GB 15K SAS drives takes an entire day.

My thought is to run a RAID 0 on a pair of OS/programs drives and keep a recovery copy on a flash drive so the corrupted drives can be wiped and the recovery copy restores the system in short- well, shorter, order.

BambiBoomZ 

[DGroves]

as i stated, do your research and determine if your needs will benefit from raid,.... this includes performance/reliability/cost standpoints

i have several pci 2.0 systems here (HP z800) and 1 pci 3.0 (HP z820) and ran tests on all three systems using one then two samsung 256GB  sm951 SATA SSD's then repeated the same tests using two 256GB  SM951 (NVME) as data drives, using the systems onboard LSI controllers which are "ROC" type controllers without cache, then on the z820 i also tried a LSI9270-8i card which is pci 3.0 with two SAS based 400GB SSD's

last, i then tested two HP turbo Z gen 2 NVME based cards in a HP z840 that had 512GB SM951 SSD's

all systems were tested in Raid-0 while i would have liked to do 3 or 4 drives in raid-0, i simply did not have the ssd's available

the fastest and cheapest setup was using the two HP turbo z gen 2 cards in both the z820 and the z840 systems

the next fastest was the LSI9270 card in the z820 with the two SAS based SSD's

the only benefit i personally see in the LSI 9270 is the ability to have dual Raid cards for better uptime and perhaps beter performance in server usage with more I/O  than a single users system will create

your preferemce in  making a imag of the OS drive and backing up the data drive is a solid way to protect data at a reasionable cost

while keeping total cost of ownership within bounds and i have no issue with that (wish more people backed up their data)

my previous comment was made to point out that a raid-0 array using 4 SSD's may not have the performance to cost benefit that would be aceptable to most users. and that alternate configurations may be better suited for a home or small office user

EDIT: i forgot to mention that the startech x4 M.2 adapter is a SATA interface so raid-0 using that is pointless as even one SM951 SATA SSD is able to saturate the SATA buss.

using it for a raid-5 setup might be worthwhile however

the newegg M2S4C quad M.2 adapter looks interesting, but again is a SATA based interface, so raid-0 is again pointless from a speed aspect

i do know of one company who makes a  PCI-e 8/16 interface that mates to a quad m.2 carrier but i can locate little information on it, but i know it isn't cheap as it's targeted for the enterprise market

http://amfeltec.com/products/pci-express-gen-3-carrier-board-for-4-m-2-ssd-modules/