WWAN port support for NVMe SSDs

[VDC4]

Hi everyone,

I read there that an G9 laptop officially supports NVMe SSD in WWAN port:

On a side note, I just ordered a g9 (elitebook 650) that officially supports ssds in the wwan slot

Does anyone know where exactly this support is stated? I can't ask in the original thread as it is locked.

TIA

[VDC4]

Alright, I found it. It's in the Maintenance and Service Guide for EliteBook 650 G9:

The secondary solid-state drive is installed in the same connector as the WWAN module.

Secondary SSD is not mentioned in the Guide for EliteBook  860 G9 though. Which should mean this is not supported, at least officially.

BTW, does anyone know whether WWAN port in 860 G9 supports some interface beside PCIe? SATA or USB? I assume PCIe support since the host interface of the supported WWAN modules is said to be PCIe.

[TzortzisG]

Hi VDC4.

That thread you were referring to was about a discussion on the matter we had more than a year ago. Actually, modern HP laptops have almost 0% support when it comes to secondary storage installed in their WWAN slots. In the case of the (pseudo)Elitebook 650/640 G9/G10, there is LESS than 0% support. It took me about a year to actually understand what HP had done with this series. After renaming the Probook 6xx G8 line to ""Elitebook"" 6xx G9, they decided to provide each model with two different types of motherboards. The first kind has the usual B-keyed WWAN slot for a cellular card, but the other kind has something completely different: a normal M-keyed m.2 slot for normal PCIe SSDs. Since this slot is still located near the edge of the motherboard (and the laptop case), the SSD has to be of a shorter length (2242 just like the WWAN cards), but aside from that this slot is in every other aspect a typical m.2 slot meant for storage. This very interesting approach on secondary storage concerns not only the 6xx G9/G10 series, but their almost identical sibling models -the Probook 4xx G9/G10s. The real problem is finding which models are equipped with these "real" m.2 second slots and which have the (good for nothing) WWAN slots.......

The true-Ellitebook HP laptops (like your 860 G9) are completely different from the rebranded-Elitebook 6xx G9s. Obviously they don't share this double-motherboard feature, since they are always equipped with the usual B-keyed WWAN slot that ONLY supports the PCIe interface. More importantly they have a completely different UEFI firmware (more sophisticated) that is pretty much the same on all the Elitebook and ZBook models. This firmware will usually support PCIe storage on the WWAN slot, but with many caveats. Only one PCIe lane is available to the WWAN slot, these slots will not work with all storage controllers -they are extremely partial to older SSDs with older PCIe controllers, obviously no normal M-keyed SSD can be used -only B+M keyed PCIe3.0X2 drives, and finally there are many bugs and glitches when working with this secondary unsupported storage. This is why most users after a while decide to go back to the original setup and remove these SSDs......