Z820 Make Use of Front Drive Bays

[peterbata]

Thank you again @DGroves. Forgive me for not providing my system specs from the outset. This is uncharacteristic of me.

See link to System Info screenshot. I did not include the entire screen. Most of it was the RAM which totals 256GB.

I checked the BIOS settings and NUMA is enabled.

System Info 

[joselso]

Worth mentioning: HP illustrated brochure 'Workstation support for 2.5" Mass Storage Devices', URL:

http://h20331.www2.hp.com/hpsub/downloads/workstation_support_for_2.5in_mass_storage_devices_101712....

recommends on pages 3 and 5 the use of HP P/N 488507-003 (AMO P/N FX615AA) ODD Bay Carrier for installing a single or dual 2.5" storage devices (HDD's, SSD's) in the external bays at the front side of the Z820 workstation.

[peterbata]

Thank you for providing that link @Joselso. Much appreciated.

[DGroves]

for 256GB ram, set numa to DISABLED to force each cpu to only access it's ram banks (IE-each cpu only sees 128GB)

also this HP paper may be useful to you

https://h20331.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/PCI_Express_3.0_technology_optimizations.pdf

[peterbata]

Roger that @DGroves. In one of your earlier replies you said:

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)

I believe that I took care of the network card bios but, I was unable however to locate the section where I would disble the LSI boot rom as you had suggested.. Is this the section that you were referring to:

LSI Adapter Properties 

[peterbata]

Hello again. I assume that when you said: "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" you were referring to the grey port located to the left of where the optical drive is connected.

SATA Port Grey 

[SDH]

Pete... I bet you get this right... with kindness.

What set consisting of two ports is gray in this Z820? 11, 13, or 15?

...choose 11...

[peterbata]

Hmmmm! Might it be 11 😀

Thanks for providing those pics. I have only had the Z820 for a few days and just wanted to be absolutely sure. Measure twice / cut once.

[peterbata]

Hello again @SDH. I trust that you are having a great weekend so far. I was wondering if you could direct me to a site or a document that will provide me with diagrams of the different components of my Z820. I have downloaded a good number of PDF's related to this model but don't see much in the way of actual diagrams. Such as the one that is shown in one of your replies to me. It would be greatly appreciated. Peter

[SDH]

The later versions of related documents are worth having because they contain fixes, added info, and may deal more with the v2 versions of the Zx20 workstations. Look on pages 33-34 (bottom of each page) for your diagrams. This is v5 and you can find more documents and manuals from HP pretty easily.

c04205252.pdf (hp.com)

(same as https://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c04205252.pdf)

Source: 
https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/setup-user-guides/hp-z820-workstation/5225041