2.5inch bay on HP Zbook 15 G6 too small to fit a hard drive

Recently I got a new laptop and I was surprised to find out the HP Zbook 15 G6 won’t fit a 2.5 sata/ssd drive. The bay is just too small because part of the motherboard takes up space in the bay which should accomodate a 2.5 inch drive.

I have had contact with HP and after a few ticket escalations I got the answer. If you order the HP Zbook 15 G6 with the NVIDIA® Quadro® RTX 3000 GPU there just isn’t enough space because of the size of the RTX 3000. That’s why the connector isn’t available either.

In this particular case it’s HP SKU 6VD99AV (i9 + RTX 3000). But there are other SKU’s which might have the same problem, like 6TU91EA (i7 + RTX 3000). According to HP: if you absolutely require the 2.5 inch bay to add a SATA drive you need to order NVIDIA® Quadro® T1000 or NVIDIA® Quadro® T2000 graphics options.

When I ordered the laptop I couldn’t find anything on the spec sheets indicating that the 2.5 inch SATA bay would become useless. It’s a very unpleasant surprise when opening up the laptop with an additional SSD ready to be added to the system.

HP refers to the second NVME / M.2 module. And yes… that’s the only way you can add additional (and more expensive) storage if you have the RTX 3000.

Update 20200224: HP released a customer advisory statement ZBook 15 G6 Mobile Workstations – May Not Have SATA Connector