Simplified Installation of M.2 NVMe Drives on HP z420, z620, z820

[CARomero]

Okay, I know this is a bit of an older topic, but can anyone finally confirm or deny that the Samsung 960 ECO can be made to work in the Z620? I have not installed the hacked BIOS but I have the referenced ASUS PCIe card, am wiping the drive and installing Windows from scratch, hoping things work out but if someone can tell me they actually succeeded and lay out their settings, that will help me decide whether to persevere. if I hear from here that I'm wasting my time I will just go ahead and get a second cheap SSD to use as a boot drive, but I'd clearly rather not do that.

[SDH]

This is not a direct answer to your question, but the hassle factor seems quite high getting the Samsung M.2 SSDs working in the ZX20 workstations unless you are buying a HP product with HP engineering/firmware added in.

I'll get a third Kingston Predator M.2 SSD and try it in a spare Z620 i have here.  I've got the other two working very well in two different Z600s, both version 2 workstations and one with two of the highest clock speed official HP processors (quad cores), and one with two of the highest clock speed official hexacores ( a bit slower clock speed than the one with the 2 quad cores).

I have posted in here on how the specific storage controller driver used in these Z600s can make or break this configuration.  I also tried the Samsung SM951 AHCI 256GB M.2 SSD in these Z600s (using the ASUS  Hyper M.2 x4 Mini PCIe adapter) with no success at getting it to show up on the Z600s as a boot drive.  Once booted via a regular SSD that Samsung would show up as a usable drive, but never as a bootable drive.  Way too much time spent......

So, I figure that I'll be able to do the same Kingston approach also with a Z620.... hopefully an easy boot via Kingston Predator M.2 SSD if I figure out what storage controller works with it.

I'll be back in a week or two with the answer.... have to order the third one (best price seems to be straight from Kingston right now, about 165.00 for the 240GB one (which is all I need for my boot/applications drive).  Make sure to buy the kit that comes with the PCIe adapter rather than the M.2 drive by itself if you want to do this too.

EDIT:  With tax that all came to a bit under $180.00 USD......

[CARomero]

SDH,

Thanks for your followup. I ultimately resorted to this Clover Boot Loader-based workaround here:

http://www.win-raid.com/t2375f46-Guide-NVMe-boot-without-modding-your-UEFI-BIOS-Clover-EFI-bootloade...

Wasn't hard at all, and adds about two seconds to the boot time. The only remaining downside is the USB stick that protrudes from the machine 😕 I intend to add internal USB2 ports and move the stick inside (the motherboard has suitable headers for this). 

Not 100% sure I'm getting full performance from the drive but >2 gig/second read speeds ain't bad. I think Windows boots in ~2.5 seconds. Once I get RAM boosted to 96GB next week, I will start trying some meaningful workloads (tiny Hadoop+Spark cluster). I expect to have fun 🙂

[MtothaJ]

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@CARomero wrote:

SDH,

Thanks for your followup. I ultimately resorted to this Clover Boot Loader-based workaround here:

http://www.win-raid.com/t2375f46-Guide-NVMe-boot-without-modding-your-UEFI-BIOS-Clover-EFI-bootloade...

Wasn't hard at all, and adds about two seconds to the boot time. The only remaining downside is the USB stick that protrudes from the machine 😕 I intend to add internal USB2 ports and move the stick inside (the motherboard has suitable headers for this). 

Not 100% sure I'm getting full performance from the drive but >2 gig/second read speeds ain't bad. I think Windows boots in ~2.5 seconds. Once I get RAM boosted to 96GB next week, I will start trying some meaningful workloads (tiny Hadoop+Spark cluster). I expect to have fun 🙂

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If you have other disks in the machine you could install the bootloader onto one of those.

Or as you suggested either plug the usb drive internally or to one of the USB ports on the back of the machine so it is out of sight.

Thanks for confirming that this approach works - at least we know there is a workaround for the newer NVMe disks.

PS. The other bootloader which is perhaps more suited to PC than Clover is Duet.