Z Turbo Raid

[Mackinback]

So I've been tinkering with my z640 that I use mainly as a media server..

I just recently swapped my old 4tb for an 8tb RAID1.. Added more RAM and GPU..

I swapped my SATA SSD for Z Turbo that I've had laying around. BUT..... I do have another Z Turbo..

Is it possible to RAID0 it? Currently the Z Turbo is in slot4.. Only remaining are 5 & 6.

Thanks

[DGroves]

the z840 supports up to 4  HP z turbo drive G2 cards (with dual cpu's) the z640 only supports 2 ( slots 4/5) as i recall and you must have Minimum BIOS revision of 1.53 for HP Z440, Z640, and Z840 to use this card

if you install more than one card, you need to set the turbo G2 cards ID address using  the 3 sets of jumpers  on the card

once the card is installed, you can create a software raid 0/1  (non bootable) as the ssd'd do not have the necessary OROM bios code for raid booting (it can boot as a single non raid drive)

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/lit_files/116531.pdf

[Mackinback]

Hey DGroves -

So there was a post on here where somebody did RAID 0 with the Z Turbo on their OS drive but with a z240. It clearly isn't anything HP supports and does not appear to have been done on a z640. So probably something I don't want to mess with but was hoping to get a little more r/w out of this thing..1850/2500 currently.. Already having remorse with using a fresh OS copy when I switched over to the turbo drive a week ago. 😊

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

there is no way to do a bootable raid 0 using the HP z turbo cards,....this is a HARDWARE LIMITATION (as the cards are simple pci-e to m.2 adapters) unless the Bios has the necessary intel OROM or 3rd party hardware on the motherboard .

note that this only applies to PCI-e cards,...the workstations can do raid  via software (non booting) and bootable for some models  (like the z820's onboard LSI SAS/SATA controller) 

while you can use 3rd party cards that have the necessary hardware to be bootable, these cards are either cheap and slow or  fast and very expensive

the z240/z440/640/840 supports nvme drives natively as a single boot device, they also have a enhanced bios that includes the intel OROM code to do a bootable raid 0/1 which the z420/z620/z820  line lacks

so to recap the later Zx40 line can do bootable raid 0/1 and it is a HP supported config, the earlier  Zx20 can not due to no bios support for it

https://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c02815117

[Mackinback]

That explains it then. Thanks for the insight!