NVMe boot drive in hpz840

[Michael554]

Hi!

want to upgrade my hpz840 mith nvme boot drive. I'am not much into this theme, so i'll need some help.

first question:

- Should i under any circumstances get a hp NVME to PCI adapter (Turbo Drive G2/Dual etc), or can I take any adapter? Are the HPZ Turbo Drive as fast as the other cards?

Is there somewhere a kind of manual how to proceed with the installation of a NVMe as Boot drive?

Cheers,

Michael

[SDH]

Michael, welcome.

NonSequitur777 is helping out another new forum member on the same issue, one generation forward (Z8 G4). His advice is excellent and I'd recommend following along with that thread, HERE.

Here are some ideas for you. It is very much worth getting a quality NVMe boot/applications drive going. There will be a quantum leap upward in your user experience with that. The ZX G4 next series of workstations have NVMe M.2 drive sockets on their motherboard but the ZX40 series relies on a PCIe3 card as the interface for M.2 drives. Both the ZX40 and the ZX G4 generations have their fastest PCIe slots topping out as PCIe3 technology. It is not until you get into the very latest generation, the ZX G5 workstations, that you get any PCIe4 technology slots.

Do not feel concerned... PCIe3 is very fast, and it turns out that if you buy a quality NVMe M.2 drive with a PCIe4 controller you'll get some added speed benefit from your PCIe3 slot. HP gives advice on exactly what slot to use in your Z840 for your Z Turbo Drive G2 card. IIRC it is slot 1. It is slot 4 for the Z440/Z640 but you also can use the x8 or x16 slots in those for a ZTD G2 or ZTD Dual Pro.

I believe there is no better interface card for a single M.2 NVMe SSD than the ZTD G2. It has that nice big aluminum heatsink and was specifically engineered for these HP workstations. There is the ability to run more than one of those at a time, it runs cool, and it occupies only a single PCIe slot width. There is even a single slot width ZTD Dual Pro that allows you to turn on bifurcation for the PCIe x8 slot and run 2 M.2 sticks side by side in the ZX40 series workstations. The ZTD PCIe cards have extra capacitors on board to improve data integrity through power fluctuations.... and can feed drive activity signals to the HP motherboards via a 2-wire basic cable to run the front case drive activity LED. You can get those ZTD G2 cards now for as low as under $20.00 on US eBay, recycled. My advice is to only get the HP ZTD G2 or ZTD Dual Pro (which you can run with only one M.2 stick in place if you wish in your x8 slot). These are engineered to very high standards.

There are good posts here on the install process. I recommend downloading the HP Cloud Recovery tool assuming your Z840 is Windows Licensed. That allow you to download a W10 install optimized by HP engineers. You'll need a 32GB thumb drive. You should update to the latest BIOS before starting all this.Then you set BIOS to factory defaults, have the M.2 stick prepared with GPT-partitioning and NTFS formatting (long type) and install the OS onto the M.2 drive with no other drive in place. Then update that initial install with Windows Update. You even can install W11 latest 24H2 atop that with tips from this forum. I'm liking a 1TB stick for boot/apps drive, PCIe4 controller. Many excellent ones are there to choose from.

I've done this many times... it is quite a project, but you'll learn a lot in the process. I'll post a couple of the HP PDFs on those cards and their install shortly, tomorrow.

[SDH]

Found a couple of the install HP documents, attached below. An added good link for perspective is HERE .

The forum has a search bar up above, but it is a bit anemic in search power. Try google too.

See below...

[SDH]

Michael,

Thanks... there was a very good post I did that was lost in eSpace, and finally has been found just now due to your questions. That post shows the creativity you can add into the mix with your Z840. Running the ZTD Dual Pro with a fast PCIe4-controller M.2 boot drive in the primary (upper) socket and a larger "slower" less expensive PCIe3 M.2 documents drive is a very fast way to go. That is what I'm doing here.  The ZTD Dual Pro cards can only be used with two M.2 sticks if your HP workstation BIOS supports bifurcation... later BIOS in the ZX40 workstations, the ZX G4 workstations, and beyond.

That lost post worth seeing is HERE and note that it includes two links to rare install manuals, for both the version 1 and the version 2 of the ZTD Dual Pro PCIe cards.