SSD as the boot drive

[ngoodacre]

I recently bought a HP Z420 at a good price to replace my ageing Dell Dimension 9200 desktop. I did this mainly because I have run into the upgrade barrier for the Dell - it supports only version 1 PCIe. I thought that with PCIe version 3 that the Z420 supportsI would be able to put in a Samsung 950 EVO and run it with NVME; I should add that the Z420 came with Windows 8.1 installed and this supports NVME. The first blow to this ambition was that the Z420 does not have any M2 extension slots. My fault, I should have checked beforehand. However it seems that one can plug an NVME device onto the PCIe socket using an adapter; but another problem now became clear when I looked more closely at the capabilities of the chipset used in the Z420, it is just one revision short of being able to support NVME. Alright, I decided to curb my ambition and just replace the HDD in the Z420 with a Samsung 850 EVO which is a lot cheaper than the 950 and still much faster than the HDD even though it would be driven via the same SATA interface.

Looking at the posts on this subject though There is some question whether or not the Z420 will support booting from an SSD even on a SATA interface!!! Can this crippling limitation be true?

 

[USAFRet]

On the regular SATA port, it makes no difference whether old HDD or 850 EVO SSD.
It will work.

Now...that motherboard may only have a SATA II port. An SSD will work in that, but it will be a little bit less effective than if it was in a SATA III port.

 

[ngoodacre]

Thanks, you must be right; the contrary is too ridiculous. I'll order a Samsung 850 evo and install it as soon as I can find my way around the BIOS/UEFI of this machine.