Nvme boot drive mac pro pro#
Nvme boot drive mac pro series#
Nvme boot drive mac pro free#
Nvme boot drive mac pro windows#

intel SSD DC P3500/P3600/P3700 - boots fine in 4k modeВ (512byte mode not tested).

Micron P9300 - boots just fine in 4k mode (512byte mode not tested).

Micron P9200 - boots just fine fine in 4k mode (512byte mode not tested).

Nvme boot drive mac pro free#

Over the longer term it probably would probably make sense to collect a list of drives that are known to work/not work, so I'll make a start ( if anyone has tested other drives feel free to send me a message and I'll ad them to the list here!).

My recommendation is to stick with enterprise-grade NVMe drives from Micron which often go for modest amounts of money on ebay. So if you expect that you can just go ahead and buy the latest consumer-grade NVMe SSD and it will just work fine as boot drive in a zx20 then you'll very likely end up disappointed.

Nvme boot drive mac pro series#

Later NVMe versions introduced a series of changes to how a drive communicates with the host and other things which affect booting, and especially consumer-grade drives are usually designed around the latest standard with little to no backward compatibility.

Nvme boot drive mac pro pro#

It should be remembered that the level of support for NVMe drives in the zx20 is not the same as in it's successor (zx40) or any other modern PC, it's a retrofit of basic NVMe 1.1 boot support which presents certain limitations (Apple did the same with the old Mac Pro 5,1 from 2012 where NVMe support was retrofittedВ with the last firmware 144.0.0.0, in terms of boot support is it's as picky as the zx20). This means if you purchase a 2nd hand enterprise drive then you have to pay attention to how it's configured, and preferably erase all namespaces and then create a new one with the appropriate settings. For such a drive to be able to boot in zx20 machines there should only be a single namespace (usually '0') for the whole drive, configured in a standard 512k or 4k partition. Namespaces - many enterprise SSDs support namespaces (a way to partition up a physical drive into virtual drives). Sector size is important, some drives boot in 4k mode (which is preferred for NVMe drives) while others will only do so when set to 512byte mode.Д¤. This means that drives which are not backwards compatible with NVMe 1.1 (which includes most newer consumer-grade SSDs) will *not* work as boot drives!ДЈ. NVMe boot support *only* works if the machine is in UEFI mode *and* legacy support for storage is * disabled*! However, if you have a drive with UEFI CSM (like the Samsung SSD 970 Pro) then legacy support must be enabled for it to work as boot drive.Дў. It seems this thread has turned into a hot mess with lots of speculation and spread of false/incorrect/outdated information some clarification is probably required:ДЎ. Hopefully this information finds people looking for information regarding NVMe in z620/820 before the stumble upon the outdated information that is still promoted by other members. The reason I posted this was that I still found threads from this year (2020) compiling a long list of steps one supposedly must to do to be able from NVME, which is a complete waste of time when there is now direct NVMe support.

Nvme boot drive mac pro windows#

I've been running NVMe boot drives in z620/z820 for over a year now, and currently run a 3.84TB Micron 9200 U.2 NVMe SSD in 4k mode on a U.2-to-PCIe adapter in my personal z620 running Windows 10. I tested the same drives in a system known to not have NVMe boot support (Dell Optiplex XE2) and none of these drives were bootable there, which shows these drives don't just boot because they have a special boot ROM (CSM) - in which case they would have booted in the Dell as well! All the others booted fine under Windows 8.1/10 and Linux (RHEL, SUSE), with either 512 byte or 4k sector sizes (both worked fine).

I tested a number of NVMe SSDs from Sabrent (M.2), Micron (M.2 and U.2) and intel (U.2) in my z620, and the only one which the machine didn't boot from was a 4TB intel P4500 with speciality firmware (HPE/Facebook).

As a result, a z620/z820 updated with the latest BIOS (which currently is version 3.95A) will boot fine from most M.2 and U.2 NVMe drives as long as the machine is in UEFI mode. While it is true that the z620 (as well as its bigger brother z820) didn't support NVME boot when they were released, HP has added NVME boot into of the later BIOS versions (starting with BIOS 3.84) so that the z620/820 could support Gen2 z Turbo Drives which use NVMe SSDs (G1 used PCIe SSDs), presumably so they could use Gen2 drives as replacement for failed Gen1 drives (adding NVMe support was probably cheaper than keeping separate stock for Gen1 and Gen2 drives). I now want to point out that this answer is NO LONGER CORRECT! One of the questions that seem to come up regularly is if a HP z620 workstation can boot from a NVMe SSD, and the often touted answer is that it can't without additional tools or modifying the BIOS.