HP DL360 Gen9 – How to Add M.2 NVMe Enablement Kit

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I have a HP DL360gen9 8sff

Applications running on the machine are saturating the current disks, all Intel Enterprise SSD disks.

I would like to add M.2 NVMe drives but I can't figure out which enablement kit should I buy and install.

In the user manual I can see two kits exists with different serial numbers: 764628-B21 and 817676-B21

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In the Dl360gen9 manual seems both can be installed:

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But nowhere is specifing if those are M.2 or not.

Plus I can see there's another kit 878783-B21 which is listed as "HPE Universal SATA HHHL 3yr Wty M.2 Kit" without any compatibility list.

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From the pictures seems a M.2 PCIe board, but will it work with DL360 Gen9?

By the way we have some older DL360 gen8, if that board is really universal could we install it on gen8 servers as well?

HPE Universal SATA HHHL 3yr Wty M.2 Kit

Thanks in advance for any help!

Best Answer

Ok, so the first parts you detail are for the NVMe-specific DL360 chassis, if you've not bought that version of the DL360 then these aren't the part for you, if you have then yes, that's how you attach their s.2 NVMe drives, not m.2.

The 878783-B21 will fit in a DL360 but bear in mind that it needs SATA m.2 drive, not NVMe ones, these are harder to find these days and are no faster than any other SATA drives.

If you have a spare PCIe slot open then might I suggest you just buy an NVMe adapter for that, I like the Intel ones but there are lots available. They're not hot-swap but are pretty univerally accepted, certainly as a data drive anyway, life gets complicated if you want to boot from them. But you get all the benefits of NVMe by just slotting a PCIe card in.

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