Support for NVMe drive

[PeteB67]

My laptop (17-ab200ns) should support NVME SSD as primary drive  as stated in the service manual (Page 3 specifies support for M.2 PCIe NVMe (TLC) SSD).

I have tried three different NVMe drives (120GB Samsung PM961 MZ-VLW1280, 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus and 1TB SABRENT Rocket - all TLC drives) but all three result in Blue Screen crashes. . I can install Win10 on all the drives and the system is generally operable for 10-20 minutes before it crashes. Swapping back to a regular HDD and the system works fine. I am on the latest BIOS from the HP support page.

Can someone confirm what NVMe drives are supported by this laptop. I note that the Samsung and Sabrent are very modern PCIe3x4 drives that might not be supported by the laptop but that doesnt explain why the older 120GB Samsung drive also doesnt work.

[Huffer]

Yes the system is compatible with NVME M.2 SSDs and should work fine with a 3x4. If it were not compatible it would not even show up in the BIOS so if you can install Windows to the M.2 SSD and it boots the system is compatible with it. How are you installing Windows onto the M.2 SSD? Do you remove the hard drive when you do so? I see your model originally came with a 128 gig M.2 SSD likely a SATA. What did you do with it?

[PeteB67]

Huffer, thanks for your rapid response and confirming that the laptop should work with NVME PCIe3x4 drives.

Yes, I have the original M2 SATA drive that shipped with the laptop and that works fine as does an HDD that I had available and tested. However, I am looking to upgrade to a faster NVMe drive.

In each case, I installed Windows 10 from a recent USB ISO with no other drives in the system. I installed the operating system into a 200GB partition so that I can use the remaining space as a data drive. In each case the installation worked fine but introduced instability to the laptop that caused blue screen within around 30 minutes. I used the standard NVMe drivers from the ISO but also tried the Samsung driver for the EVO. This did not help. Returning to the original M2 SATA or HDD restored stability.

I have seen similar online reports of blue screen problems with NVMe drives citing issues such as over-heating and "running too fast for the PC to keep up" but sometimes that just adds to the noise ! I would really appreciate any help resolving this.

[Huffer]

I've probably upgraded a few dozen laptops to NVME M.2 SSD and just have not experienced anything like you describe, let alone running too fast to catch up. Even an NVME SSD runs at a fraction of the speed of the processor and memory. Heat can be an issue, but again it has never caused me instability problems.

Do you remove the hard drive when you are installing the OS? I would and do. Where are you getting all the needed drivers besides the NVME driver? Let Windows set the partitions. You can always shrink and split onto 2 the largest partition  later to make a storage drive. 

[PeteB67]

Yes, I remove the HDD from the laptop when installing the NVMe drive. I use the standard drivers on the Windows 10 ISO in each case. I only tried the samsung driver (from the Samsung 970 EVO support page) to see if it would help the problem - it didnt.

I will try doing an installation without partitioning to see if that works. Thanks for the suggestion and I'll report back.

[Huffer]

You need to be sure to add in the HP drivers for things like the chipset and other system drivers. Have you been installing any HP specific drivers? You can just download and install HP Support Assistant and it will identify your system and provide most but never quite all the drivers. Some you have to search out. The Windows 10 generic drivers are a bit of a trap...it looks like they are OK but the specific drivers are much better and more stable. 

https://support.hp.com/us-en/drivers/selfservice/HP-Pavilion-17-ab200-Notebook-PC/13810159/model/138...

[PeteB67]

Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately, I get the same result leaving windows install to do the partitioning. I also tried cloning the known good M2 SATA drive to the Samsung 970 but get the same stability issues. I installed HP Support Assistant on the Samsung cloned drive but it detected nothing to update.

I'm left thinking that this is most likely a hardware issue with my laptop rather than anything else. Thanks for the support.