Can I add a 2 TB or 4 TB SSD drive to an HP Pavilion Gaming laptop 17-cd0085cl?

[TucsonNiel]

I have an  HP Pavilion Gaming laptop 17-cd0085cl with a 256 GB Solid State Drive which is my C: drive. I would like to replace it with a 2 TB SSD.  I'm unsure of which 2 TB SSD is compatible, and which installation instructions I can find online.  I am looking at a "HP FX900 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD 2280 M.2 Gen4 x4, 8 Gb/s Internal Solid State Drive Up to 7400 MB/s Compatible with Laptop & Desktop PC - 4A3U1AA#ABB" and I see other HP 2TB SSDs listed as HP FX900 Plus.  I also see an HP FX900 Pro 4TB.  Is it possible to upgrade to a 4 TB SSD?  My HP Pavilion Gaming laptop is 5 years old.

According to the HP specifications, my current SSD is a "256 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD." 

Thanks in advance for any help offered.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Your PC's M.2 NVMe slot is PCIe Gen 3.0.

While a Gen 4.0 SSD will work, it will not run at its maximum advertised read/write speeds.

This table shows the maximum transfer speed each PCIe slot generation can provide:

PCIe Speeds and Limitations | Crucial.com

The HP branded drives are very good, but if it fails during the warranty period you can expect a difficult time getting support.

I have read many posts on this forum where the drive goes bad, and the serial number of the drive is not recognized in the HP warranty system, etc.

Just so you know up front.

Theoretically the sky's the limit as far as the maximum capacity NVMe SSD goes as long as the drive is single-sided.

Below is the link to the service manual:

Maintenance and Service Guide HP Pavilion Gaming 17 Laptop PC

Below is the link to the service teardown video:

Replace the Battery | HP Gaming Pavilion 17t-cd0000 CTO Series | HP (youtube.com)

[TucsonNiel]

Thank you very much for your help.  I have successfully installed a 4 TB Crucial PCIe 3.0 NVMe M.2 SSD into my HP Pavilion Gaming laptop model 17-cd0085cl.  It wasn't easy and required 4 different technical support calls into Crucial.  I installed the 4 TB Crucial SSD into an M.2 SSD enclosure via USB, and tried cloning my Windows 10 C:/ drive image, which was on a Samsung 256 GB SSD.  However, the Acronis True Image software that comes with the Crucial SSD said it was unable to clone an image, because the Crucial SSD was not 512 bytes/sector after I formatted it under Windows 10. So, I connected the USB cable of the 4 TB Crucial M.2 SSD enclosure to an Ubuntu 22.04 laptop and used the Gparted disk utility to format it as a GPT partition instead of NTFS. Then I used the Acronis True Image, and it worked this time and cloned the Samsung 256 GB SSD Windows 10 C:\drive image to the 4 TB Crucial SSD.  Then I removed the 4 TB Crucial SSD from the M.2 SSD enclosure, and installed it into the laptop.  I also upgraded the laptop memory from 16 GB to 32 GB.  I have gotten a lot of practice now taking my laptop case apart and putting it back together, again thanks to your help pointing me to the right direction! I am very grateful for your assistance.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome, and thanks for the detailed report on what you had to do to install the 4 TB NVMe SSD.