Why can't slot 3 in the z440 be used for the Z Turbo Drive G2 as it meets the X4 spec - new info

[TwoMetreBill]

I created a thread with the same subject except for - no info. That thread is now locked. Creating a new thread because much of the info in that thread is incorrect or unrelated to the subject. 

The Z440 does support bifurcation on the X16 slots, it can be turned on/off in the BIOS. The default is on. 

PCIe slot 3, X4, doesn't work for anything on my machine; perhaps defective. When I plugged a OWC PCIe to SATA SSD adapter into the slot, with a Samsung 840 EVO 1TB on the card, the machine will not even boot. Moving the card to slot 5, a X16 slot, and everything is fine. Tried a USB3 card in the slot, again machine is dead. Moved that card to slot 1 and everything is grand. Had a similar problem with my previous Z420. 

This is really disappointing as I was hoping to plug the OWC card in slot 3 and later put a dual to quad NVMe adapter card in slot 5. 

From hunting around the web, it appears that HP does strange things with their PCIe slots. Guess my next machine will be a home built with an ASUS XEON motherboard that supports their VROC card. With Samsung NVMe Pro cards, it can hit over 30GB per second. That's right, gigabytes, not bits. It is just so much more expensive to build that to start with a HP workstation and upgrade it to meet my requirements (desires?). 

Anyway, anyone with an idea of how to use the X4 Slot 3? 

[BambiBoomZ]

TwoMetreBill,

If the z440 BIOS is similar to the z420 /620.820 BIOS, check the slot settings in "Advanced / Slot Settings"  The slot could be disabled. If so, change setting to enabled.

It's also possible the slot is  set to a reduced bandwidth. If the PCIe slots in "advanced" are at the default setting of "Auto", try changing the setting of Slot 4 to it's maximum setting.

One consideration is that the z440 PCIe Slot 3 is PCIe 2 x4. In both z420 and z620, a benchmark test of a Samsung 970 EVO M.2 data drive was seen as substantially lower- but it did work. Currently, the z620 is running a Z Turbo (AHCI) in Slot 4  (PCIe x8) and tempoarily in Slot 5 (PCIe3 x16)- the 2nd GPU slot, the 970 EVO M.2.

A PCIe 2 slot should run the drive, and the z620 manual says the slot preference is 4 > 3, but warns of reduced speed in 3.  The situation may be different for a boot drive, perhaps the system is configured to be unfriendly to booting from a PCIe 2 slot- not sure.

The fact that the two cards that did not run in Slot 4 ran on other slots means there is not a device or driver problem, so it is possible that Slot 4 is not working.

BambBboomZ

[TwoMetreBill]

Thanks for the detailed info. I did go into the BIOS and increased the speed but it still doesn't recognize cards so your suggestion that the slot might be defective is probably correct. As I'll get all the speed I need, vs what I want, by plugging my new SSD into the regular SATA port, I'll go that way with the Z-Turbo in slot 4 and the OWC adapter/SSD in slot 5. 

Plugged a drive into one of the sSATA ports which resulted in the corruption of 2 external hard drives that are connected to a USB3 port. I forgot to change the sSATA ports to AHCI without RAID. Booting the machine corrupted the directories of 2 of the 3 external drives. Strange. 

Thanks again, 

Bill 

[SDH]

A recurring theme with Windows 10.... it wants things its way.

I have seen cross contamination from Windows 10 Pro 64 into Windows 7 Pro 64 builds if they were on two separate boot drives and all were powered up and W10 was the selected boot drive in BIOS.  I have used multiple boot drives in the past in the same workstations that were all Windows 7 Pro 64 and never got cross contamination when I used BIOS to subselect what would be the boot drive.

I have changed over to using boot drive switches that fully power off the alternative boot drive before a cold boot, and even have figured out how to fully shut down and eject a boot SSD and replace with another boot SSD to get around this issue.

That has worked perfectly....

[TwoMetreBill]

Thanks but not applicable. Only have Win10 installed on the Z Turbo Drive G2. Plugging the new Samsung 860 EVO 2TB into the first sSATA port caused 2 external drives to be corrupted and effectively erased.