Can I add a 3 or 4TB M2 drive on the motherboard?

[JM267]

Older PC upgrade

[Bill_To]

Greetings @JM267 

HP MB support sites are broken for many HP PCs.

So I can't check your MB's specs.

You could do a PCIe to M.2 NVME x4 adapter if your MB has an open PCIe x4 slot.

You could also do a PCIe to M.2 NVME  x1 adapter in a PCIe x1 slot but this would deprecate transfer rates 

The NVME drive installed in this adapter could only be used as a data drive if native MB M.2 support is missing.

Some folks have used "Clover" to enable booting to an NVME drive on a Legacy MB. I have never needed to try Clover so I could not elaborate.

Regards

[JM267]

I really appreciate your response.

Both of my PCLe expansion slots are occupied, but great suggestion. I have a HP motherboard 2B4B 1.04 spec sheet, but it only lists the M.2 slots, not their capacity. Not finding a way to attach the .pdf for you.

I've also found several other postings that cover this subject, but the largest drive mentioned is 1 TB. There is also suggestions to update Bios ( mine is currently A0.07) to A.014. Not finding the download on HP.com.

My thought was to replace my SATA 3 TB mechanical (data only) disk drive to improve the PC's performance. I could replace it with a SATA SSD but liked the faster reads/writes like 2, 000/1, 700 MB/s.

Here are links I found that help a bit:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/SSD-drive-failing-Need-to-repla...

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Desktop-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/M-2-Drives-on-Thimphu-Intel-Z17...

If you are willing to pursue this a bit more, I'd be grateful

Thanks

[Bill_To · Accepted solution]

Greetings @JM267 

My pleasure.

It appears HP has discontinued support for your PC. So a BIOS update from HP would not be doable.

And I can't see HP adding M.2 BIOS support in a BIOS update since your PC's MB does not natively support M.2 drives.

You can certainly do a 2.5 inch SATA SSD replacement if your PC's MB does not have a PCIe x4 slot. And the PC should boot to the new SATA SSD.

You would have to try to get Clover to work if you want a bootable M.2 NVME SSD.

I've got older PC's using 2.5 inch SATA SSDs. I have newer PC's using very fast M.2 NVME SSDs. I can't see a difference when comparing these systems during normal daily use.

An NVME drive: will provide faster benchmark scores and is much quicker when reading and writing large files. You would see very little difference between a 2.5 inch SATA SSD and an M.2 NVME SSD unless you routinely work with very large files.

Regards

[JM267]

Thanks again for your suggestions and observations. My old and trusty high-end PC (at the time of purchase) continues to work well, except of course, for the inevitable slowing. After weighing your feedback, all the research I've done, and reading about all the possible pitfalls, I've decided on another solution that only struck me yesterday. Your feedback solidified my decision.

I could replace my 3 TB disk drive with a 4 TB SATA SSD internal drive, using the came connection. Looking to the future potential of another PC someday, I can instead purchase a 4 TB external SSD and actually get better performance (according to specs). 1. It can connect to any and all current and future PCs. 2. It makes moving my large data storage to an new PC very simple.

You have been a big help and I appreciate your time and expertise.

Thank you! 

[Bill_To]

Greetings @JM267 

My pleasure.

Your plan looks good.

I've enjoyed our interaction.

Best wishes