Add ASUS HYPER M.2X16 V2 Card and 2 NVMe RAID0 to boot Z620

[SSJEAhwal]

Dear HP Community Members

I have a Z620.

BIOS: J61 v3.96, 29/10/2019

Baseboard: A158

2* E5-2690v2

Memory 192GB

I am wondering about the ability of upgrading my Z620 and adding the following parts:

1. ASUS HYPER M.2 X16 Card V2

2. Two - Western Digital WD 500GB SSD, WD Black SN750, M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen3, Read up to 3,470MB/s, Write up to 2,600MB/s, IOPS R/W up to 420/380K, 1.75M Hours MTBF, 300TBW.

 

Is my workstation compatible with this configuration? Considering that I want to RAID 0 two “WD Black SN750” on that “ASUS HYPER M.2 X16 Card V2“ and use it as boot drive.

Kind regards.

[Brian1965]

The BIOS on the HP Zx20 series of workstations do not support bifurcation, i.e. splitting a x16 lane PCIe slot into 4off x4 lanes, or a X8 lane PCIe slot into 2off x4 lanes. The Zx20 series can only be used with single M.2 drive adapter cards, but mutiple M.2 adapter cards may be used. Basically, if you installed the ASUS x16 adapter card in a Zx20 workstation, (and populated it with 4x M.2 drives), the Zx20 BIOS will only see 1 of the M.2 drives - the first M.2 drive. Also, the Xeon E5-1600 and 2600 series CPU's, (both v1 and v2 versions), do not support Intel VROC. (DMI = 32Gbps bandwith, VROC = 128Gbps bandwidth).

There is plenty of recently posted information on this forum regarding the compatibilty of NVMe drives as boot drives on Zx20 workstations, so I would recommend you have a search first. The overall general consensus being that the majority of the newer NVMe drives can only be used as data drives, or as boot drives using the DUET/REFIND approach, i.e. adding the necessary NVMe boot code to a bootable USB or SATA drive, (which the BIOS can see at boot). The Zx20 workstations have limited UEFI support which is required for these newer M.2 drives to boot natively.  

[SSJEAhwal]

Thank you so much Brian1965

I really appreciate your effort and cooperation.

So, Just to be sure, I understood that I can't use 2 NVMe drives installed on one card and RAID them.

But I can use a PCIe card to add a single NVMe drive and use it as a boot drive?

Kind regards.

[Brian1965]

Virtually any NVMe drive can be used as boot drive in a Z620, but because the Z620 does not have full UEFI support in the BIOS,  the DUET/REFIND approach is required. This requires a bootable USB drive or SATA drive as a means of adding the necessary NVMe boot code for the computer to boot the OS from the NVMe drive.

As I mentioned, there is plenty of recently posted information on this forum regarding the compatibilty of NVMe drives as boot drives on Zx20 workstations, so I would recommend you have a search on the forum first. Use the advanced search feature to search specifically within the workstation section.

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/Updated-quot-Add-N...