Upgrade to new SSD, Samsung 970 EVO NVMe on HP Spectre X360 Convertible

[TerjeA]

Hi everybody, TerjeA from Norway, a little challenge.....

I want to change the existing SSD NVMe of type LITEON CV5-8Q256-HP (SATA (SSD)) to Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe 500GB.

Some questions:

1) Will the Samsung work properly on the PC?

2) The Samsung has a top speed og 3.500MB on read, and 3.300MB on write. What is the max speed an upgrade will achieve? The motherboard is  HP 81A1 (U3E1).

3) Are there any settings in BIOS I have to change to make the new drive work?

4) I will clone the software from the old drive to the new one using Samsung Data Migrate software, (as I have done many times before).

Well what do you think??

Best regards TerjeA

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately no....the 13-4100 series only is compatible with SATA type M.2 SSDs. Here is the Service manual:

Manual

On page 2 it refers to PCie/SATA M.2 SSD, but if you look at page 20 you can see that all of the compatible SSDs are SATA M.2 and no NVME M.2 is listed. This was one of the earlier models to use an M.2 SSD and when this laptop was introduced the terminology was not fixed yet. In fact both SATA M.2 and NVME M.2 are using a PCie bus so it is not wrong to call it PCIe/SATA but that is not the same as PCIe/NVME. 

Post back with any more questions and please accept as solution if this is the info you needed. 

[TerjeA]

Thank you so much….. I was sort of expecting your answer, so not a big surprise there. I will look for a M,2 SATA drive as I need more space.

Do you recommend an brands to work with this PC???

Best regards

Terje

[Huffer]

I personally prefer the Samsung 860 Evo but there are a lot of players in this space like WD, Adata, Sandisk. There is not much variation in performance among the various brands and we have not had reports of compatility issues with SATA M.2s unlike NVME which do produce some issues now and then.