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HP Recommended
Z230 Workstation
Microsoft Windows 10 (64-bit)

Hello community,

I have bought a PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe SSD and am wondering if there is any way to install it at my workstation, even with the use of adapter.

 

Regards

 

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1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Accepted Solutions
HP Recommended

It will work fine. You can buy an Asus m.2 PCIE x4 adapter for like 20 bucks and plug it in and treat like any new storage drive . This will give you fast storage but not bootable as mentioned.

 

You can even get fancy raid cards with bifurcation chips so instead of 2GB speeds with single M.2 you can get around 7GB sustained speeds with 4 M.2 sticks in raid.  Even the newest Z8 G4 cant do any better than that. 

View solution in original post

9 REPLIES 9
HP Recommended

DaredDevilE12,

 

Consulting Passmark baselines, there are 361, HP z230's tested.   The z230 uses either Xeon E3-12XX v3 or 4th generation i7 (4770, 4770K, 4790, 4790K).  

 

As the z230 was made well before the advent of NVMe memory, it is possible to use NVMe in a data drive configuration, but as a boot drive, the only options are to use NVMe with a legacy boot feature- a built in BIOS module.  There are two such systems in the Passmark baselines, one each of E3-1231 v3 and i7-4790, both using a Samsung 950 Pro 256GB NVMe.  the Disk mark for these drives are:  10415 and 10170 where the average for that model is 11708.  By the way, the highest Disk Mark for the z230 is 25605 using Samsung 840 EVO 250GB- possible a quad RAID 0.

 

The Samsung 950 Pro NVMe is a possible NVMe solution, but is not the highest ranking M.2 drive in a z230.  In a z230, an HP Z Turbo Drive M.2 256GB AHCi  (Samsung SM 951 AHCI) scored 12732- higher than either example of NVMe drives. these have very good potential; in an HP z620  (Xeon E5-1680 v2 8C@4.3GHz) /64GB /Quadro P2000 or GTX 1070 Ti), an HP Z Turbo Drive M.2 256GB AHCi  had  Passmark Disk marks up to 14500.  But configuration is important and on Passmark,  other examples of that drive in z230 score: 7809, 7110, and 3341.  

 

f the decision is to use a Z Turbo Drive, the AHCI version- now sometimes called "G1" is strictly required and will be more costly than the G2 and G3 NVMe versions as used in zX40 and later HP systems.

 

Another M.2 drive used in z230''s are 13 examples of Samsung XP941 256GB AHCI with scores of 8361 to a low of 4571. The key as a boot drive is either AHCI memory or a legac y boot feature.  The Z Turbo Drive AHCI has such efective optimization- and including a very effective cooling solution and performnace that would be my recommendation if you need the M.2 speed. 

 

I would mention though that in my experience, I notice almost no difference in startup time between the M.2 and SATA; file loading and saving times- perhaps 4-6 seconds at startup as compared to the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB.  The benchmark numbers of M.2 look great on a page and I think in certain high intensity disk applications, the M.2 advantage will be obvious, but look carefully at your uses.  There are a lot of very good cost/performance options.  On Passmark there is an AMD FX-6300, 3-core! system using the Samsung 860 EVO 500GB and that score is 24424 - quite amazing and possibly a quad RAID 0, but today (11.15.18) an 860 EVO 500GB is only $85.

 

BambiBoomZ

 

 

HP Recommended

It will work fine. You can buy an Asus m.2 PCIE x4 adapter for like 20 bucks and plug it in and treat like any new storage drive . This will give you fast storage but not bootable as mentioned.

 

You can even get fancy raid cards with bifurcation chips so instead of 2GB speeds with single M.2 you can get around 7GB sustained speeds with 4 M.2 sticks in raid.  Even the newest Z8 G4 cant do any better than that. 

HP Recommended

the HP workstations up to and including the z840 do not support bifurcation, there is no option in these systems bios's to enable this since the motherboard hardware does not permit splitting a pci-e x16 slot into 2  seperate  pci slot signals

 

as such trying to add in a card that requires bifurcation to work (like your quad raid card) will not be seen corectly by the system and it will fail to work as expected

HP Recommended

Well I’m using a Kingston DCP1000  in my older Z820 right now and it gets almost 7GBps sustained by adding / controlling bifurcation via Plex chips built into the card.

 

My Z840 does the same useing a cheaper none active highpoint card with no bitfurcation plex Chips.

 

HP Recommended

the Kingston DCP 1000 does not use bifurcation to deploy the 4 SSD's to the system

 

bifurcation must be built into the BIOS and must also be supported by the motherboard chipset, the z820 supports neither

 

https://www.kingston.com/us/ssd/resources/dcp1000-faq

 

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/kingston-dcp1000-3-2tb-pcie-ssd-card.2542328/

HP Recommended

Actually you can hack most any bios to add it.

 

Bifurcation, well the DCP1000 does provide the same type of thing.  I mentioned it does bifurcation via added plx chips ( I used bifurcation as a generic term as in these PLX chips do provide the same “switching”  on the card as bifurcation would have  ). Maybe I should have made this point clearer is all.

 

I don’t care what it’s called but it’s fast as all heck. 

HP Recommended

bifurcation is a term that should not be used in a generic sense in your posts, either your systems bios supports it or it or it dosen't and is a method of splitting one 16x  slot into swo seperate 8x slots  within that 16x physical slot

 

Plex chips on the other hand take a pcie signal lane and repeats/duplicates it into two signal lanes in this case the card in question uses a 24 lane PLX chip which takes the existing physical 8x lanes and creates 4x lanes to each M.2 slot on the card

  a system that supports bifurcation through the bios has nothing in common the two are compleatly diffrent in what they do 

 

again , bifurcation when used in a pc is a way to split a single physical pcie slot into two indipendant slots within the same physical slot

 

a PLEX chip is a componet on a pcie card that takes a existing PCI signal lane and duplicates it, giving you two lanes using signal switching and can be used on several cards at the same time

 

some motherboards also come with Plex chips to give more pcie lanes to the slots on the motherboard.

however plex chips do not provide "free" pcie lanes there are limits on how many lanes you can add due to speed/switching restrants

 

 

 

   

HP Recommended

Does it ever stop? 

 

HP Recommended

As i understand your message, there are pcie x16 cards with bifurcation function. Did anyone tried this solution? And what hardware to search? Any brand in mind?

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