Solved: Adding a second SSD to an Omen 880 desktop - HP Support Community

LuxMajestic · ‎05-16-2018

I have an HP Omen 880-180d. It has a Tampa2 motherboard with four expansion slots:

Two PCI Express x16 physical slots (Gen 3.0), each slot with x8 bus lanes

One M.2 socket 1, key A

One M.2 socket 3, key M

I'd like to add a Samsung 970 EVO NVMe M.2 (1TB) to the machine. I already have a 512GB SSD in one M.2 slot. Is it possible to add the 970 EVO in the other M.2 slot? I don’t think it can be used for storage because on the motherboard diagram, it says "M.2 WLAN socket (Key A)”. Can this only be used for Wi-Fi?

If I can’t use that slot, can I place a 970 EVO in one of the PCIe x16 slots by using an M.2 NVMe SSD NGFF TO PCIE 3.0 X16 adapter?

Any help is appreciated. 🙂

Big_Dave · ‎05-19-2018

Hi,

I have been looking to possibly buy a Samsung 970 EVO as the specifications look quite good.

Forget about using the m.2 socket 1 for any NVMe SSD.

There are many choices for PCIe m.2 adapters but the Samsung 970 requires x4 version 3 for best performance. I ran an Intel 750 off one of the processor attached PCIe x16 slots and it works quite well. The downside on my PC is that both of the processor attached PCIe slots downshifted to x8.

If you plan on installing an OS on the PCIe m.2 adapter card then remove all of the other m.2 and SATA devices before doing so. It might be interesting to see how the HP BIOS will handle dual UEFI Windows Boot Managers. I don't have any issues multiple Windows Boot Managers on my custom PC.

HP ENVY 6055, HP Deskjet 1112
HP Envy 17", i7-8550u,16GB, 512GB NVMe, 4K screen, Windows 11 x64
Custom PC - Z690, i9-12900K, 32GB DDR5 5600, dual 512 GB NVMe, gen4 2 TB m.2 SSD, 4K screen, OC'd to 5 Ghz, NVIDIA 3080 10GB

View solution in original post

Big_Dave · ‎05-19-2018

Hi,

I have been looking to possibly buy a Samsung 970 EVO as the specifications look quite good.

Forget about using the m.2 socket 1 for any NVMe SSD.

There are many choices for PCIe m.2 adapters but the Samsung 970 requires x4 version 3 for best performance. I ran an Intel 750 off one of the processor attached PCIe x16 slots and it works quite well. The downside on my PC is that both of the processor attached PCIe slots downshifted to x8.

If you plan on installing an OS on the PCIe m.2 adapter card then remove all of the other m.2 and SATA devices before doing so. It might be interesting to see how the HP BIOS will handle dual UEFI Windows Boot Managers. I don't have any issues multiple Windows Boot Managers on my custom PC.

HP ENVY 6055, HP Deskjet 1112
HP Envy 17", i7-8550u,16GB, 512GB NVMe, 4K screen, Windows 11 x64
Custom PC - Z690, i9-12900K, 32GB DDR5 5600, dual 512 GB NVMe, gen4 2 TB m.2 SSD, 4K screen, OC'd to 5 Ghz, NVIDIA 3080 10GB

LuxMajestic · ‎05-19-2018

Hey, thanks for the detailed reply, it's appreciated.

I've installed all my critical applications onto the 512GB SSD boot disk, and everything fits into about 400GB, so I'm going to leave that alone now and wait a while before adding another SSD.

I'll probably add a 1or 2TB SSD to one of the external drive bays (with a 2.5" to 3.5" caddy) and just use it for data. One of my applications has a data cache of 200GB (!) - it would be great to have that on an SSD rather than the 3TB 5400rpm HDD it's on right now.

Adding a second SSD to an Omen 880 desktop

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