A Z620 V2 and NVMe boot success

[TankSlappa]

I've seen several conversations (and arguments) over Z620 (and probably Z820) booting from NVMe.
And as things were cheap on ebay, and I have a Z620, I thought I would have a play, and possible add to the known working list.
And here I am, typing to you on Windows 11 Pro, booted off a PCIe NVMe drive.

The details, and things I learnt:
Machine: HP Z620 V2 twin Xeon E5-2667 V2.
BIOS: J61 3.96 (standard, latest available at time of posting).
NVMe drive: Intel DC P3605 1.6TB
PCI slot: Lowest x16 (only slot I can access as my GPU covers all the others!)

Legacy boot support is turned off in the bios.

The OEM info from isdct says Oracle, but that doesn't seem to be a problem. The drive arrived with the latest firmware 8DV1RA13, or at least isdct says there is nothing to update.

The SSD must be set for 4K sectors. Mine came with them set to 512, and the drive just wouldn't appear in the boot list, even though windows would happily install to it, and it appeared as a data drive when I booted Windows off another drive.
To change the sector size I used the Datacenter control tools - SSD_DCT_3.0.27_Win64b
To get DCT to work I had to find some proper Intel drivers for NVMe, the standard ones in windows 11 ones would not work with isdct.exe on the command line (they were fine to use it as a data drive, just no low level command support). I used Intel NVMe drivers 5.3.0.1005 which I found with some googling - Intel have deleted almost everything legacy after passing the storage side of the business to someone else... Thanks Intel (not!).

This is the command I used to change the sector size to 4K. It was the only Intel SSD in my machine, so #0.
isdct start –intelssd 0 -NVMeFormat LBAformat=3 SecureEraseSetting=0 ProtectionInformation=0 MetaDataSettings=0

But after all that it benchmarks on par with P3600 series drives on Passmark's website.

Overall, 1.6TB working fine (1.45TB useable by windows), nice and zippy, for under £100 on ebay. Drive has 5 years of uptime, 36 boot cycles, and is 100% healthy according to Intel SSD Toolbox, with over 90% life left.

I hope this helps someone.

[DGroves]

again, the z X20 line (and the zX00 line) lacks native bios support for booting nvme devices

however there were some, enterprise/datacenter and two consumer retail nvme ssd's that included the missing nvme boot files in the ssd's firmware that allowed it to boot on systems that lacked motherboard bios nvme boot support

i've covered this subject a few times and have used most of the known bootable ssd pci-e and M.2 devices including several not mentioned in the video link like the seagate nytro warp drive ssd, and the Oracle F40/F80 cards and the OCZ Revo line of sandforce based SSD's

as you note, the intel DC36xx/DC37xx models of ssd's do have the necessary nvme boot files i like you have a OEM 3605 model with custom Oracle firmware

Please watch this video for more information

last it is possible to boot from any current nvme drive by using a loader file that boots the system from a usb key that contains the missing nvme code that merges into the x20 series workstations during boot supplying the necessary boot code

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrZEYkNl9aI

[TankSlappa]

Yes, I'm aware that the Z620 3.96 BIOS lacks support for NVMe drives, so it is very restricted. I have seen your posts.
I hadn't seen mention of the P3605, and as there were a load of them on ebay for not much money, I thought I'd give one a try and then publicly share success or failure for others.

I'm familiar with chainloading from USB bootsticks, and knew that's an option (I use that on my G8 Microservers to allow me to have an OS drive in the optical tray), but wanted to avoid that on the Z620 (it lacks the internal USB socket of the Microserver, which hides the "kludge").

My post wasn't a question, I just wanted to share the info and hurdles (which were mainly finding intel drivers to be able to change the sector size, since Intel decided to just delete all their file downloads!)

[DGroves]

as i recall the z620 like the z820 has a onboard 9 pin USB header on it's motherboard which allows using a 9 pin female to usb A adapter so the usb key can be installed inside the case

https://www.amazon.com/BAIRONG-Motherboard-Adapter-Female-Dupont/dp/B09B1VGCDR/ref=sr_1_8?crid=9UB3Z...

and i'm aware your post was not a question, i simply added some information so readers could better understand why you SSD worked and some other bootable SSD options that are available