Elitebook 840 G1 - Is booting from the internal M.2 SSD possible?

Hey guys,

New here, this is my first post. There seems to be a whole lot of knowledge around here, and I hope that you can help me with this:

I'm basically torn between the Lenovo Thinkpad T440s and the HP Elitebook 840 G1. I'd like to have both a mechanical hard drive for data and a SSD for the OS. The HP and the Lenovo both have an M.2 slot and I've seen people online that have purchased the MyDigitalSSD 128 GB drive (which apparently is the only 42mm M.2 SSD currently available) and booted the Lenovo notebook from it.

The HP service manual suggests that the M.2 slot should only be used for caching drives. My question is: Does the HP Elitebook 840 G1 accept the SATA M.2 drive and could I boot my favorite Linux distro from it? Or did HP do something tricky in the BIOS that really only let's people use the M.2 slot for caching drives and that does not allow booting from it?

Thanks for your help!

 

From memory, I think there's a "boot from mSata" option in bios.

I don't think there's an mSata connector, just the M.2 one. So it might be possible to boot from the M.2. Just guessing.

 

You could try it and see. As ghostaki mentioned it seems like it should be possible.

 

I think it depends on which bus the M.2 connector is hooked up to on the motherboard. If it is wired directly to the PCIe bus, then you probably can't boot from it (the BIOS won't see it as a bootable device, unless they've worked hard to add that functionality). If it's wired to the SATA bus then you can, but only if your SSD is a SATA M.2 SSD. Very good article: Understanding M.2 NGFF SSD Standardization (Or The Lack Of)

 

It's a single keyed slot, so it should be connected to both. I'm not aware of any 42mm PCIe M.2 drives though.