Z Turbo drive G2

[SDH]

Forgot to mention... I'd download the most recent Samsung Magician, no cost, from Samsung. It allows firmware updates of their consumer M.2 cards, allows setting overprovisioning on those, gives you some added options, and some speed testing. It does not do as much with the Samsung OEM M.2 sticks. It is now 8.0.0:

Magician in Z440 ZTD Dual Pro

EDIT: Performance Improvements in the Z440 due to processor and memory upgrades:

[Yannis6]

SDH

I think that the NVMe m.2 disk  can also be a boot drive! There is parameter at the BIOS (SATA emulation) where you can change the boot drive. If i change this parameter,  then it recognize the Samsung SSD 980 as a boot disk!

Do you know if i could install a second Z turbo G2 card in my workstation.? WIll it then recognize two NVMe disks?

Then there is no need for me to change the raid controller.....

[SDH]

The big question I need to know is what did you change it to?

In many of the prior HP workstations that setting in BIOS was RAID, AHCI, or IDE. The main thing that changed is what drivers you got when you did a clean install. IIRC if you set it to RAID you got RAID plus AHCI drivers installed. If you set it to AHCI you did not get any RAID drivers but did get the more modern faster AHCI drivers. If you set it to IDE you did not get either of those but instead only got the older slower IDE drivers.

A few of the HP workstations changed to only giving two options for this in BIOS: RAID and IDE. If you chose RAID you got RAID plus AHCI drivers during a clean install (and there was no option to only get AHCI drivers). If you chose IDE before a clean install that is all you got. It was near impossible to inject different drivers after a clean install in W7, but that became easier in W10. Both HP and Intel recommend that these BIOS setting to be set to RAID + AHCI (or the equivalent of that by setting it to "RAID" if the second option does not exist). That is the default setting from the HP factory, also.

I have not heard before that you could change the SATA Emulation BIOS setting and turn a NVMe M.2 stick into a bootable device, but if that involves switching the drivers over to the "IDE" option then you'd be running on way-old technology drivers. What exactly did you do?

[SDH]

Regarding that question of if you can add a second "Q1-out" ZTD G2 to your Z800 I'd vote yes. To keep things as simple as possible I'd use the same type of NVMe M.2 SSD as you now have up and running as a non-boot M.2 SSD because you know that works. At least in the Z440 I've had a ZTD DP plus a ZTD G1 (or G2) drive up and running simultaneously with a total of three M.2 sticks going at once, including having an AHCI-controller stick in the mix of 2 other NVMe-controller sticks. Seems pretty robust to me. I'd again only use another modified ZTD G2 card in your Z800 for that experiment. I'd not yet go into the issue of changing SATA emulation settings in BIOS until you get this first question answered in practice.

Later you might change one of your non-boot ZTD mod-G2 PCIe Gen2 positions to an attempted boot position. You have more PCIe Gen2 x4 electrical lanes (or greater) open slots in your Z800... I have none left. Don't forget that I tried to get one of the HP Samsung SM951 AHCI-controller 512GB M.2 SSDs to load as a boot drive in my Z600 by cloning, and failed. DGroves has taught me that it always is best to do a clean install onto a M.2 stick with no other drives in place when pushing the limits. I have not done that yet. Mine was a clone attempt.

So far, I only have evidence that I can get a Kingston Predator AHCI-controller M.2 SSD to be the fastest boot drive on a Zx00 workstation. By the way, the very much more modern Zx40 workstations have some way down in price for box/processors/memory. And we know how to soup those up too. Maybe it is time to at least ponder getting one of those.

[Yannis6]

SDH

i changed to IDE. I will put a second pie card with a second NVMe and I will let you know. I will also do a clean install of win10 and I will send the results….. 😉

[SDH]

Had a chance this afternoon to do another test. I again tried to work on the Z600 with unmodified Z Turbo Drive G1 and G2 cards and once again the Z600 could not work with those. Then I inserted the ZTD G1 card with the "Q1-Out" modification into the PCIe slot 3. That is the single slot I've not been using because it is a PCIe Gen1 slot (but at least it has 8 electrical lanes). Virtually all M.2 SSDs use only 4 electrical lanes so the extra 4 in this slot are simply not used. My logic was that so far PCIe cards I've worked with have been backwards compatible in earlier PCIe generation slots. That turned out to be the case here too.

Below is what I plugged into slot 3 in this Z600 v2... I removed the backplane plate to just friction fit it in for this quick and dirty test. That way I did not have to unplug and drag everything out from under the desk.

Note that I was then using two of the Q1-Out modified ZTD cards. HP engineered these so that you can shift one or more of the green jumpers to ensure you have different device IDs for the different cards. I leave the primary card (with its Predator M.2 AHCI-controller boot drive) at its defaults (all green jumpers to the far right). I change one of the green jumpers of the second card from default to shifted to the left, as shown). You can shift any or even two or all three of those just as long as they don't look identical to the other card.

The NVMe M.2 stick is a 1TB recycled HP PM981a, but it just as well could have been a recycled Lenovo stick. After a couple of restarts it showed up as a fully usable drive in Device Manager, Disk Management, etc. This Z600 is running under W11 so things likely would be different if I was running under W7Pro64. I believe it would run just as well under W10.  It is, however, not as fast as it could be in the Z600 because it is running in a PCIe Gen1 slot rather than a Gen2 slot...which would provide about 2x the bandwidth and speed.

So, using a NVMe M.2 SSD this way as a documents drive in a Gen2 slot would indeed work well. If I had a Z800 rather than a Z600 I'd shift this second ZTD card to one of the added PCIe Gen2 slots the Z800 has. I've hit my limit in the Z600, and like USB3 enough I'll not give up the PCIe Gen2 slot that my HP USB3 card sits in.

EDIT: To keep confusion down... If the workstation was instead a Zx20 or later those know how to keep a ZTD card happy, and you don't need to remove the Q1 transistor from the ZTD G1 or G2 cards for those later workstations. However, those also don't seem to care if you have removed their Q1.

[Yannis6]

SDH

could you tell me the drawback of setting SATA emulation setting to IDE? What is this going to  affect?

[SDH]

I've not gone into that deeply. Years ago, when I was working on understanding optimized BIOS settings for HP workstations I read that HP and Intel both recommended to set SATA emulation to what got you a combination of both RAID and AHCI drivers. I figured that kept all your options open for the future especially when I learned that what you chose resulted in locking you out of easy access to adding the other drivers later.

When you choose that you also end up with IDE drivers. I read those are old hardware drivers and would not unlock the full speed/capabilities of modern drive hardware that could make use of the newer AHCI drivers. I personally don't use RAID but figured I'd do what HP and Intel said, get the benefit of AHCI, and continue to not use RAID. Then along came the speed and reliability of SATA SSDs, and more recently the even faster speed of NVMe PCIe bus M.2 SSDs... I'd like to not have an IDE driver slow my hardware down.

I'm sure others on the forum understand if there is a significant downside to running modern drive hardware under IDE drivers. Certainly, the google knows also... but I don't.

[SDH]

Here are some interesting updates.

I had hoped that the Z Turbo Drive Dual Pro and Quad Pro (DP and QP) were engineered without the mechanism HP used to keep the ZTD G1 and G2 from running on older HP computers (or non-HP computers). I explained earlier that this mechanism was discovered by a non-HP electrical engineer and that he also figured out how to disable that (by removing the Q1 transistor on the ZTD G1 and G2 cards). When I tested here this morning with a ZTD DP and a QP using the same NVMe M.2 stick that can be used as a documents drive in this Z600 that stick could not be recognized or used. When I put it back into my "Q1-Out" ZTD G1 and back into the Z600 it immediately was visible and useable by the OS. I have never heard of how to disable that mechanism in a ZTD DP or QP. Knowing how to do it in the G1 and G2 is all we need, on a practical level.

I used this Z600 to demonstrate the speeds of 4 different boot or documents drives, shown below. The first is a SATAII Intel 320 series 2.5" form factor SSD boot drive, and results 2 and 4 show the speeds of the NVMe-controller M.2 1TB documents drive in a PCIe1 versus a PCIe2 slot in the same Z600. Finally, result 3 shows the speed of the Kingston Predator AHCI-controller boot drive in its PCIe2 slot. The Crystal Disk Mark latest version (with default settings) was used, and the results are ordered from slowest to fastest:

1. I did not even waste time on cloning the boot build over to a HDD. The SATAII SSD performance clearly has room for improvement. Remember that the native SATA bus in the Zx00 workstations is SATAII, not SATAIII. DGroves has posted about PCIe cards that can boost SATA speed up to SATAIII as a partial workaround. Here's my SATAII SSD in use:

SATAII SSD (Intel 320 Series)

2. The NVMe-controller 1TB M.2 drive can function in the one unused PCIe slot I had available, but that is a PCIe1 slot. All the slots used in this testing provide at least 4 electrical lanes. Virtually all M.2 drives only use a max of 4 lanes. PCIe1 is better than the SATAII bus, but there is still room for more improvement:

NVMe 1TB documents drive in PCIe1 slot

3. The Kingston Predator M.2 boot drive has an AHCI-controller that can use up to PCIe2 bandwidth/speed. It can't do better in a PCIe3 slot because of the limitations of its controller. I can live with that as my best boot drive option in a Z600. You'll be able to see why it feels so much faster compared to the SATAII boot SSD shown in #1 above. My Predator sticks are 240GB in size, and these are rare now:

Boot Predator M.2 in PCIe2 slot

4. When you give the 1TB PM981a M.2 documents drive more breathing room in a PCIe2 slot in the Z600 it can start to show more of its potential. Remember that its controller is optimized for NVMe protocols in a PCIe3 slot. It runs about twice as fast when inserted into a PCIe3 slot in a Z440 workstation. However, at the speeds shown below in the Z600 even in a PCIe2 slot this is clearly a worthwhile upgrade as a documents drive:

NVMe M.2 in Z600 in "Q1-Out" ZTD G1

5. EDIT: I wanted to see how well a 512GB SM951 AHCI-controller M.2 SSD would work in the Z600v2 if given a PCIe2 slot, mounted in a ZTD G1 "Q1-Out" card. I used the lower video card slot which works fine with other types of PCIe cards inserted. Here's the results... quite fast, but that stick would be best used in a Zx20 workstation in an unmodified ZTD G1 or G2 card because it could be a boot/applications drive running at PCIe3 speeds in those workstations:

Samsung SM951 AHCI-controller M.2 in PCIe2 Z600

The ZTD G1 and G2 are functionally equal cards, but the G2 has that nice big aluminum heatsink. The NVMe M.2 sticks run hotter so a recycled G2 card is a better choice in my mind. I've found that the used heat pads on those are pretty easy to clean up with warm water and dish soap if you keep them under water. They are delicate but won't tear if you're careful. You can gently dry them with cloth patting and place them back on the card.

Of interest, I've noticed the ZTD Dual Pro cards, both v1 and v2, actually don't have the bottom heat pad touching the bottom of a single sided M.2 stick... so for the ZTD G2 I'd say the top heat pad is the most important one to have.

[Yannis6]

SDH

One more question , please. Do you know anyone having placed succesfully Noctua fans on Z800?

Thanks in advance.