I am currently researching whether I can install one of the multiple-m.2 or multiple-mSATA PCIe cards in my z800 as a data drive. Prior research has told me it is fruitless to try using this as a boot drive due to lack of UEFI in the z800. I'm looking at an adapter with four SSDs. These cards are set up as an internal RAID0 array to combine the capacities of multiple cards. In fact, I believe this is how all the larger PCIe SSDs, including the well-known ones from Intel and others, are set up.
This I believe is also the foundation of the new HP Turbo Z Drive Quad Pro, which supports up to 4 m.2 drives. HP says they do not support this drive for anything but the latest z440/z640/z840, at least as a boot drive. Since I'm not interested in using it as a boot drive, I would be interested to know if this drive might work for me. If I could get my hands on one, it would be easy enough to test, of course. The other issue is that HP charges $500 each for Samsung m951 m.2 SSDs that you can purchase online for under $300. Besides which, I want to use 1TB SSDs, which HP does not sell yet anyway. HP sells the HP Turbo Z Drive Quad Pro with one drive in it, which of course I could pull and re-sell in order to use four 1TB SSDs IF I knew the PCIe card itself would work in my z800. I am aware that the card may perform slower on my PCIe 2.0 system than it would on a PCIe 3.0 system but I just want to know if it will work at all - if anyone has tried it.
I'd rather use the HP product but if it won't work, I am wondering if, at least as a data drive, I could use a third-party card, which happens to be based on four mSATA drives rather than four m.2 drives, with 1TB mSATA drives to build a 4TB PCIe SSD RAID to use as a data drive on my z800. The issue is whether or not the RAID controller on the card will pay nice with the LSI 1098E RAID controller already included in my z800 (and which is being used on my 8TB RAID 0 array now).