Z620 HDD activity LED not working with Z Turbo Drive

[wavetrain]

Installed the Z Turbo Drive in my Z620, and can't get the HDD activity LED to work. LED works fine with installed SATA drives.

I have the HDD activity LED cable connected from the Z Turbo Drive to the correct motherboard connector pins. Have tried reversing polarity, and still nothing.

Read an online review of the Z620, and noticed in the pictures that the review unit received from HP did not have a HDD activity LED cable connected to the Z Turbo Drive.

Has anyone ever seen this functionality work, or am I wasting my time?

Thanks!

[banhien · Accepted solution]

@wavetrain

No, no activity light for Z Turbo drive because hardware wise it does not active and the connector does not have anything connected to a light.

Regards.

[wavetrain]

Thanks very much for the reply. I'll remove the cable, and not worry about the LED. The drive works great.

[SDH]

The Z Turbo Drive Generation 1 does officially work in the Z620 and the Z640, and it does produce some front power button area activity from the drive activity LED there if that cable is attached.  However, it does not produce anywhere near the amount of activity as a regular SSD or HDD does.

This info is from loading a Z Turbo Drive G1 from an Acronis image that is known to be able to drive the Z Turbo Drive G1, a SSD, and a Kingston Predator M.2 SSD in its PCIe card.  So, yes it does, but not as much.

The polarity of attachment does not matter for this particular LED.  The HDD LED activity 2-pin motherboard header is easy to find via the service manual.... it was put there originally for SAS card attached drives.

I'm with you..... it might be nice to have if it worked just as well as with a SSD or HDD, but how often do we use that LED?  It just adds a thin extra two wire cable inside the case potentially getting rubbed on by a graphics card fan or some sharp edge.  I'll use some 1/8" black spiral wrap to dink with this a bit longer but will probably put that cable in the spares drawer.

[MtothaJ]

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@wavetrain wrote:

Has anyone ever seen this functionality work, or am I wasting my time?

Thanks!

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Off the top of my head I have had personal experience with m.2 drives in the follwing boards:

- Asus Z170M + Intel 600p / Samsung 950 Pro (m.2 slot on board)

- Asus B250 Plus + Intel 600p (m.2 slot on board)

- HP Z420 + Samsung 950 Pro (via PCIe adapter card)

- Asus P9X79 Pro + Samsung 950 Pro (via PCIe adapter card)

In the case of all of the above the HDD light did not function, including in the boards which had a designated m.2 slot.

Personally I would not waste my time on this since it seems that this is just the way it is.

[SDH]

MtothaJ..... interesting info.

You may know the Kingston Predator M.2 SSD has an AHCI based controller as does the M.2 drive from Samsung HP uses in the Z Turbo Drive generation 1.  Perhaps this is why I'm seeing drive activity versus the 4 you mention..... I believe all 4 of those are NVMe based controller M.2 SSDs.

I know Kingston worked on a firmware update to get the drive activity light header to work on with the Predator M.2, and all of our HP ZTD G1s all have had the later of 2 firmware present.

[MtothaJ]

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@SDH wrote:

MtothaJ..... interesting info.

You may know the Kingston Predator M.2 SSD has an AHCI based controller as does the M.2 drive from Samsung HP uses in the Z Turbo Drive generation 1.  Perhaps this is why I'm seeing drive activity versus the 4 you mention..... I believe all 4 of those are NVMe based controller M.2 SSDs.

I know Kingston worked on a firmware update to get the drive activity light header to work on with the Predator M.2, and all of our HP ZTD G1s all have had the later of 2 firmware present.

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Yes, I also believe it is an AHCI vs NVMe thing.

I still find it quite surprising that this has not been sorted out in one way or another, especially on boards with dedicated m.2 slots and given the fact that i) NVMe drives have been around for a while now and ii) virtually all PC cases have a HDD activty light