Z230 tower workstation PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD replacement

[dpe4jc]

At my office we have several Z230 tower workstations from 2016 that were shipped with Turbo-Z PCIe 4x expansion cards that hold 256MB Samsung NVMe M.2 drives.  All of them boot just fine.  I have searched the internet for information on upgrading the ssd on a HP Z230 and most of the information says that the bios does not support using a NVMe drive as the boot disk.  My question is:  If this is true, how is it possible that these tower workstations all shipped with NVMe drives as their boot drives to begin with?  Can the 256MB drives be replaced with 512 MB or 1 TB NVMe drives on the Turbo Z cards, and if not, why not?  The excuse that the "bios does not support booting from NVMe" does not seem to hold water when these systems all have NVMe drives now.

A related question is whether a different PCIe expansion card would allow for an M.2 drive to be the boot drive.  We would love to upgrade all of our computers, but that just isn't in the cards right now so we have to make the most of what we have.

If anyone knows how to make the z230 boot from a different NVMe drive on the same Turbo-Z card please reply.  Thank you.

[DGroves · Accepted solution]

the HP z230 (both Tower and SFF) DO NOT SUPPORT BOOTING FROM NVME, they use SATA based ssd's for boot devices they however can also use the now uncommon "AHCI" based  ssd's as a boot drive which are almost as fast as a nvme drive

HP used samsung sm951 ssd's which were available in either AHCI or NVME, you need to pay attention to the SSD drive model number to determine which is which

MZHPV is the  AHCI model ssd

MZVPV is the NVME based ssd

nvme drives can be used as non booting drives in a z230

your HP Z Turbo cards use AHCI based ssd's

the HP z turbo "G2" is the same card, however the nvme based ssd is used instead

i hope this clears up you confusion

[dpe4jc]

Thank you for your reply because it was very helpful.  The one bit of information that you gave that seems to have been left off of other posts on this same topic is the difference between model numbers for the Samsung SSD.  Since my primary occupation is being a principal owner of a civil engineering company and not a computer expert, I generally have to do a lot of reading to catch up to the current technology whenever we replace hardware or upgrade our network or computers.  As you can probably imagine, for me it can be a bit overwhelming every few years.

Part of the confusion results from retailers who just want to sell you something and don't care if it will work.  If you search using the MZHPV model number, numerous sites (some of them usually reputable) say it is an NVMe drive.  I can't fault HP or Samsung for this, but it would help if Samsung would keep information on legacy products available for a few years longer than they do.  I could find nothing on the Samsung website about the drive.  If I can use some duct tape and bailing wire to keep these things running for a few more months, we will then be in a better position to upgrade everything.  The last thing I want to do is invest in the wrong workstations because our profit margin is pretty thin.  If we get the wrong workstations, we will be stuck with them for the next 6-8 years.

These HP z230 workstations have served us very well since we bought them in 2016, and they have been far more reliable and problem-free than the Dell systems we had previously.

Thank you again.

[DGroves]

the samsung AHCI/NVME sm951 drives were never a retail product, they were a OEM only drive

supplied to HP / Lenovo / and perhaps other OEM's

due to the non retail nature of this item you will not find any documentation on it as all/any support comes from the OEM itself and both HP/Lenovo have released very little information on this product other than basic spec docs included with the specs on the systems where these ssd's were available as options