Z820 Make Use of Front Drive Bays

[peterbata]

Hello. At the moment I have a Samsung 870 EVO SSD 1TB drive mounted into slot 1 of my internal drive bay. I would like to free up this space if possible. This is the adapter being used:

Blindmate Adapter 

Basically this serves as my boot drive. I have several 3.5" 1TB & 2TB drives that I would rather use with the four internal drive stock caddies. How would I go about mounting the Samsung SSD drive into one of the unused slots at the front of the PC.

Your time and assistance will be greatly appreciated. Peter

[SDH]

Peter,

The adapter you show is used to convert a 2.5" form factor HDD or SSD to duplicate a 3.5" form factor HDD. You could take it up one size larger still using that adapter. You just need a 3.5-to-5.25" form factor adapter to shift that drive up into one of your empty 5.25" bays. I'll shortly get you the part numbers of some of the nice HP versions of these. There are also many non-HP aftermarket adapters... the dimensions are the same.

Another option is to have a Z Turbo Drive as your boot drive. This is even better. The Z Turbo Drive G2 is the best PCIe card to get, and your Z820 can run both of the HP M.2 sticks intended for it (assuming its BIOS has been upgraded to one of the later versions). Those two M.2 sticks are not the current NVMe-controller type. They have an AHCI-controller instead. It turns out that the first one was significantly slower than the second. That second one is what you'd want , probably the largest version (which was 512GB) as your boot/applications drive. It is very close in performance to the NVMe type which you can't use in a Zx20. The card goes into a PCIe slot... HP tells you where. That would free up another front space.

I'll post back with those part numbers for the adapters shortly, today.

[peterbata]

Thank you so much for chiming in @SDH. Much appreciated. I am looking foward to receiving those part numbers at your earliest convenience. After reading your response I came across this post where the person says:

Hi, I've got HP Z820 and HP Z Turbo Drive G2 with Samsung SM951 NVMe M.2 PCIe, as far as I know, I cannot boot with this SSD, so I want to buy Samsung 950 PRO, but I would like to know if I can use HP Z Turbo Drive G2 as a M.2 to PCIe adapter for 950 PRO

Another HP Z Turbo Drive Post 

[peterbata]

My apologies for not mentioning that I an running ESXi v.6.5 as my Hypervisor. I really do not require much in the way of storage if all I want to do is to boot from the device.

[SDH]

Peter,

You may know that there are multiple HP part numbers for the same exact part. The Spares P/N is found in HP PartSurfer. The Assembly P/N is often embossed into the plastic or on a label on the part itself. The Option P/N is shorter and seen in many of the QuickSpecs. I'm sure it all makes sense to HP... Sounds like you only need 1 drive to be moved up. There even are 5.25" HP adapters for two 2.25" devices. But here are a few to get the idea:

Good luck on finding them... you might get lucky.

Regarding the ZTD... the G2 has that nice big heatsink, and the faster these things go the more I'd want a heatsink. The first M.2 stick for the Zx20 generation was the XP941. Slower, PCIe Gen2 AHCI-controller interface built in. The later much faster M.2 stick was the SM951, PCIe Gen3 AHCI-controller interface built in. It is the Zx40 next generation of HP workstations that could use the NVMe-controllers which upped the speed even more (and heat). There also is a SM951 with a NVMe-controller... that won't work in your workstation. There's a lot of posts in here about these things. DGroves here has done a lot of work on them. The AHCI-controller version of the SM951 is worth hunting down... I have not hesitated to buy them used, and you can still find them. The key to success in my mind is a clean install of W10 with only that drive in place, with BIOS set to factory defaults. 

The XP941 to me was "meh" in our souped up Zx20 workstations compared to a good SATA SSD. The SM951 AHCI-controller M.2 stick, however, was a big step up and much appreciated. If you found these from Lenovo or Dell those would work just as well in the ZTD G2. Here's what to look for from HP:

According to Samsung literature from the past these have a 1,500,000 hour MTBF... that's why most of ours were bought used.

[SDH]

Peter.... re your question in bold above: Yes, you can run that 950 Pro stick in an unmodified ZTD G2 in a Zx20. I don't personally know yet whether it can be a boot drive but it surely can be a very fast data drive in that card (which is very well built). DGroves, one of our gold standards and an Enterprise IT specialist has confirmed the 950 Pro can be a boot drive in those too, but I cannot yet confirm that from here.

I've been working on getting the ZTD card and M.2 sticks to work on the Zx00 workstation family. I've gotten to the point where I understand that a "Q1 transistor" needs to be removed from the ZTD G1 and G2 cards to work with the Z600. With a surgical scalpel I can remove that in about 30 seconds. HP engineered in an auto-shutdown of the ZTD card to prevent it from running on other workstations/other brands. It truly was a "loss leader".  With my testbed "Q1 Out" ZTD the only AHCI controller M.2 stick I can get to work in the Zx00 is a Kingston HyperX Predator stick... I have 3 of these working in 3 Z600s that way (hobby). Specifically I cannot get a XP941-AHCI controller or a SM951-AHCI controller to be recognized as a boot drive for loading OS onto in that generation of HP workstations.

However, those two both work fine as boot drives in the Zx20 generation (as does the Predator). No mod to the ZTD needed for that other than a recent BIOS. The Q1 removal mod does not seem to inject any issue for use in newer HP workstations. DGroves has stated the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 sticks can work in the Zx20 generation as a boot drive because it has AHCI boot code built into its NVMe controller. I have a 256GB 950 Pro I recently got to test with. It had a few startups and essentially zero hours on it. So, if that works it will be a good alternative to the SM951 AHCI-controller we know works, plus it works well with the latest Samsung Magician.

I'd listen to what DGroves has to say on this more than me. I'll get to that project soon in a Zx20 here. Related, I'm liking the ZTD Dual Pro and the introduction of "bifurcation" in BIOS to the Zx40 family and above. We have some of those running two NVMe M.2 sticks from a single PCIe Gen3 x8 true electrical lanes slot that way, and I've done 4 with the ZTD Quad Pro in a true x16 electrical lanes slot.

The Zx20 are good but getting arthritic now. The ZTD adds pep back into them, but in my mind only worth the effort with a SM951 AHCI-controller M.2 stick (and hopefully with the Samsung 950 Pro). We're shifting much more to the Zx40 and Zx G4 or Zx G5 workstations. I'd say currently the Zx40 family is the best bang for your buck if recycling, and my tuned Zx40 builds challenge the Zx G4 strongly (and win considering price benefit). Same story over the years... young beats old eventually but then becomes old itself.

[DGroves]

move the 2.5 in SSD onto one of Two blue or Grey SATA 3 6GBps ports located next to the the 4 white intel "SCU" ports this is where the drive should be connected as all other ports SCU and LSI SAS ports are sata 3GBps speed

place the ssd on the bottom of the case using dbl sided tape or buy a 5.25 external multi drive bay bracket

https://www.ebay.com/itm/175991304706?hash=item28f9e63202:g:9JgAAOSwfj1lO1a2

or place the 2.5 in ssd in between the front of the power supply and the top of the 3 external bay section near the case intrusion bracket location

rather than the 950 pro which is way overpriced and not much faster than the AHCI sm951 consider the intel 750 and P3600/P3700 series NVME ssd's and also the Oracle OEM P3605 which can also boot on the z820

i Have used/tested the 400GB 750 and the intel 3600 series (AKA the oricle firmware 3605 1.5TB SSD)

and successfully booted from them on the z820 using both the windows 10/11 generic driver and the intel driver

also enter the bios and disable the LSI boot rom and the network card bios this will drastically increase the boot up time and still leave the devices available to use under windows/linux/esxi (just the boot ability is disabled)

the xp941 is only a dual chanel ssd unlike the 4 chanel sm951 and the xp941 was the original z820 ssd option for only a very short time before HP replaced it with the faster sm951 AHCI ssd

a side note the z820 onboard LSI SAS controller will support 6GBps SAS drives but only  3GBps SATA drives

the speed difference is noticeable and small capacity SAS 6GBps drives are quite cheap on ebay 

[peterbata]

Wow! To say that I am incredibly grateful for all the useful information that you provided would be an understatement. I defintely have some homework to do. Truth be told. I have only had the Z820 for a few days. So, I am looking at some of my options and how to best optimize the machine for my need. Which as I mentioned in an earlier post would be to run a Hypervisor with a handful of VM's (Plex, Mail server, Ubuntu, Debian, Windows Server 2019) just to name a few.

[peterbata]

Thank you so much for that valauable information @DGroves. I appreciate it immensely. I am very new to the Zxxx Series workstation. I did expect that there was going to be a small learning curve. Slow and steady I suppose. I did stumble upon this YT video which I found to be quite informative / possible helpful as well.

The Truth About NVMe Boot Support in HP Z820 

Have a great weekend. Peter

[DGroves]

when running several vm's at the same time memory is paramount next to assigning specific vm's to specific cpu cores for best performance as 8gb or 16GB ddr3 registered ram is cheap on ebay fill all 16 memory slots with it do not mix ram sizes if possible

there is also a option to allow any cpu to access all ram, or force each cpu to only use the 8 ram  banks associated with that cpu it's called "NUMA"

https://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/Z820_Memory_Configurations.pdf

if you install 64GB or more then setting the bios option to force each cpu to only access the ram banks associated with it will be faster as the wait states to cross the second cpu's memory boundary for it's ram banks will cause a slight delay