Hp z230 memory upgrade

[Reznic]

Hi community,

i want to upgrade my workstation hp z230 sff with a 1tb ssd nvme drive with a pcie adapter, please confirm if 1 tb is supported.

all the upgrade videos i have seen only have used 256 or 500 gb nvme drives

[SDH]

The Z230 like the Z620, Z420, and Z820 does not have NVMe boot support. The M.2 sticks used by HP in the HP Z Turbo Drive PCIe cards for all those were based on an AHCI-controller on the stick, not a NVMe-controller. There is a lot of added info HERE .

And... Samsung did not make a 1TB AHCI-controller M.2 stick. Many don't know that HP sold a faster AHCI-controller M.2 stick, the Samsung SM951 (which also came as a NVMe-controller version). For your Z230 you would need to be careful to only get the AHCI type, but that is right on the label, and those have different model numbers. It runs faster (and hotter) than the earlier XP941 original AHCI-controller M.2 stick. So, for the HP workstations listed above I like to use the Z Turbo Drive G2 PCIe card (which comes with a nice big heatsink). I also only use the HP PCIe ZTD cards rather than generic ones. They are easy to find, recycled, on eBay.

Both HP and Lenovo sold the Samsung AHCI-controller SM951, and those all will work in a HP ZTD G2 very well. They have slightly different firmware. Lenovo even has a firmware updater for their older ones; the HP firmware is fine as is. You want your BIOS to be upgraded to the latest first because earlier BIOS versions did not support these cards. DGroves here has posted on use of an internal USB drive to start the boot process, and which then injects NVMe support into bootup, but that is pretty complex. The best option for you to use a 1TB NVMe-controller M.2 boot SSD is to simply buy a Z240 recycled from eBay, tower or SFF type, which come with NVMe boot support built into their newer BIOS. That is what I'd do because that also gets you better/faster processors and memory.

The Z240 tower uses a full height ZTD G2 backplane adapter plate; the SFF form factor needs the shorter plate. The card itself is short... and its electronics are of very high-quality vs the generic ones. Cost usually is around 25.00 USD for the ZTD G2 card, and under 50.00 for the M.2 stick.