about m.2 slot

[KEN555]

I saw the specifications that there were two m.2 slots， but why i just found one ，and it is already used by a ssd. i want to add another m.2 ssd for it.

[banhien · Accepted solution]

@KEN555

Whay is your Pavilion 690 ? Must be 690-something, for example

     https://support.hp.com/au-en/document/c05953209

The above machine has 2 M.2 slots, one for Wifi card (acn't use for stirage) and one already occupied by  a 256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD. No more M.2 slot.

Probably your machine is the same because they use SAME motherboard. The specs also says

• Expansion Slots:
  • One PCIe x16 slot   (for video card)
    
  • One PCIe x4 slot
  • One M.2 socket 1, key A  (for wireless card)
    
  • One M.2 socket 3, key M  (for primary storage SSD)
    

The only free slot on the list above is PCIex4 slot .  You can add PCIe x4 SSD to this slot, for example

             https://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Description=pcie%20x4%20ssd&Submit=ENE

Regards

[Loomis1975]

Spec sheet say it is a PCIEx4 slot that is open on sunflower on all Pavilion 690 AMD systems.  But when you look at it in the picture, and actually open up and look on the board, and its size is x1, its labeled x1, and it shows up in diagnostic software as a PCIEx1 slot and it is not open ended to allow you to put in a PCIEx4 card and use it at x1 speeds.  You don't want to put a hard drive in there through an adapter, even if you could.

And the other incorrect information is that specs list the drive that comes in there existing from HP is a 256 GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD.  This is incorrect.  Its a slower 256 GB PCIe SATA M.2 SSD.  Well worth it to upgrade to a faster NVMe drive (slot supports it) when you want to put a bigger drive in there anyways.  You will want to do a fresh windows 10 install using created install media on a flash drive from the media creation tool downloaded from Microsoft.  I wouldn't recommend cloning your existing drive to an external usb enclosure holding your new shiny NVMe drive because 1) Windows 10 isn't going to know to look for and use NVMe default drivers when it tries to boot up the cloned drive once you put it into your system in place of the M.2 SATA SSD 256GB because it hasn't had a NVMe drive installed properly before, and it won't boot up and you will be stuck. 2) you have to buy both your new NVMe drive and a compatible usb3.0 enclosure for it to do the cloning to.  Note: you can presently get around the problem 1) by buying the home license version of Macrium Reflect and cloning all partitions of your old windows boot drive and resize c: partition size to match new drive space as normal to the usb enclosure held new drive, then create a rescue media usb from inside the Macrium Reflect program.  Power down computer, swap out drives in the M.2 slot, place rescue usb stick in machine, boot up, tap ESC a bunch of times till the menu comes up, choose boot sequence, scroll down and find the UEFI listing for the rescue media, and boot the usb stick.  When it loads select other tasks, fix boot problems, let it run, after its done, DON'T click reboot, click close and go to the ReDeploy menu and select ReDeploy to dissimilar hardware.  Just leave the defaults the way they are click finish.  Once it is done, it will prompt for reboot, let it reboot and now Windows 10 startup will use the generic NVMe drivers to boot your new drive to desktop.  I would then advise to install the native NVMe drivers for the drive if you want to increase the performance of the drive a bit, might not be that much.

So you can see, just fresh installing Windows 10 to the new NVMe drive in the only M.2 slot will save you around $100 and some time.