Zbook G3 Studio Mobile Workstation

[djenkins3467]

This laptop came with one 250gb SSD, the M2 type.  There are 2 slots in it for these.  So I bought a second  250gb  SSD from Crucial and installed it,  and it does not seem to be recognized by the unit,  nor do I see anywhere in the BIOS where you can say "turn on"  a second SSD,  if you want to.   Am I missing something simple here?   Was just looking for additional storage space....not installing another OS or similar.

[Huffer]

Here is the Manual:

Manual

There are as you say, 2 M.2 slots. They are actually at right angles to each other. The primary is here:

primary M.2 circled in red

And the secondary is not shown very well in the Manual but is here:

secondary M.2 slot circled in red

Is this where you put them? What is the model of M.2 shipped by HP and what did you put in the secondary slot? How did you bolt it in? I believe there is a secondary M.2 bracket you have to order to get a screw mount for the second M.2??

[djenkins3467]

Having some difficulty with logins....so if this is a dupe I apologize.  Yes I put it in the second (open) slot which is avaiable.  The workstation came with a screw in the retention spot at the far end of the board...and it seems to hold it in place fine. Update:  I hunted around the BIOS and ran the UEFI utility, and it did find both SSD's.   But it calls the second one "unavailable".   I would hope there is a BIOS setting that toggles it somehow into "available".   

Sidenote:  This additional SSD came from Crucial and is supposed to work for this machine.....

[Huffer]

That is why I asked that you identify both SSDs..."supposed to". 

[djenkins3467]

Here above is a screenshot of the Bios UEFI Diagnostic result on the Hard Drive.  The packaging for the Crucial SSD says Crucial 250GB SSD MX500 SATA M2 2280SS SSD, so this would be the first one noted.   The second one is the OEM installed one.   I am typing this on this machine, as it continues to boot ok.  BTW....this machine is about a month old (relatively new)

Thanks,   Dave

[Huffer]

I think perhaps you cannot mix a SATA and NVME M.2 disk. I thought that might be what you were doing. Try the original disk in the secondary drive with the other drive out and see if it is "available". 

[djenkins3467]

Update:   I swapped the 2 drives in position and no change, still boots, but bios still shows the second drive as "unavailable".  I called HP tech support back to confirm how this machine was designed.  According to them, and as is shown in the maintenance manual,  both slots are supposed to be able to drive both Nvme/PCIe and SATA format drives.  So theoretically the SATA drive should work.  I did a chat session with Crucial and their only suggestion was that I might have SATA drivers missing from my OS (W7 pro Sp1).  So what to do.  Rather than invest further time trying to make the SATA drive work,  I returned it to Crucial and figured I would have better luck with a Nvme/Pcie drive. 

So I did some more research (honestly I was not that familiar with these).  The part number on the existing SSD is 861959-003, which is not available on the HP support site.  The manual calls for 840949-001 and 840950 (250 and 500gb), and these are available, at exorbitant costs.  At this point I figured safest bet is to go with another NvME/Pcie drive.  Turns out Best Buy sells these in the store,  so I figured I would give one of them a try.  After all, the OEM drive is a Samsung part anyway.  I git a 970 EVO NvME M2 drive, put it into the spare slot (as originally configured) and it works fine. 

I could leave this story here but in the interest of helping someone else who does this, I will now reveal what I might call the dumbass part.  I figured I could just install this and it would be recognized by the bios and OS.  But apparently (to me) you have to go in to Disk manager and partition it and format it just like a spinner.  Completely forgot about this, so it may be that had I done that with the SATA drive it would have worked.  Oh well, live and learn. 

I would like to express my thanks to Huffer for pointing me in the right direction here (Nvme/PCI vs SATA) !!!!! 

Thank you,  up and running....     🐵

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

Yes I assumed the second drive was not showing up at all in BIOS or otherwise...maybe a lot of work for nothing, but all is well that ends well I guess. Good job hanging in there through a long slog. You might want to mark my long post as the Solution just so it shows up at the top of search engine requests for other people with the same issue. 

[djenkins3467]

will do, again thanks

dave

[88elite88]

Hi,

do you guys by any chance would know whether we can put a  M.2 22110 NVME  p4511 Nvm into this zbook studio 15 G3?? 

thanks in advance...