Good chance there is not m2 slot in there, which means it only supports ‘regular’ 2.5" sata drives.
In which case you would need a 2.5" sata ssd, good candidates for laptops is the crucial mx500 line. The samsung 8xx Evo series is also good here, but I believe it draws a bit more power which you might not want in a laptop. It’s all small margins though.
It does. I will take a photo when I find the time…
@afre, when I was motherboard shopping late 2019/early 2020, almost every board had provision for NVMe. I would imagine that there are very few now that do not. It is true that not all will have room or PCI-X channels for two devices, or that the physical space constraints mean one 2280 space but a second space that is shorter.
When it comes to laptops, every manufacturer seems to go their own way. My personal bugbear with Toshiba is how hard it is to get to the cooling. Swapping a 2.5 inch SATA HDD for an equivalent SATA SSD, or upgrading RAM (if you’re lucky enough to have slots rather than directly soldered components) is the limit of my experience in laptop upgrades. Though I haven’t researched it, I imagine the most recent laptops use M2 for their SSDs. If I were to buy a new laptop, I would certainly look for one with the components I want already on-board … compatibility is so much trickier than for ATX-family motherboards.
I have an old HP Probook laptop. Works a lot better with a cheap 2.5" SATA ssd in. Quieter too!
@jorismak I will take you up on the offer since I am both busy and tired. See: Linux box essentials - #21 by afre.
EliteBooks aren’t that bad. These days at least they offer nice bang for buck in the ultra book space often solid strong bodies.
No clue if that’s true from one of the core i5 5xxx era.
The screen was bad from reviews. Not that bright and terrible sRGB coverage. Be aware when doing photo stuff on it.
The i5 5xxx is older now , but see it like this. From the 4000u series to the 7000u series not much changed, and they were all dualcores, even the i7 models. Yes, the 6000u serie was a small bump up in performance, but it’s still quite better than 2000/3000 series. It’s a 14nm cpu even.
They have displayport right? I see that as a plus. Hdmi is used on tv’s, displayport is used on computers 
(read that a bit tongue in cheek please, not too serious).
About SSDs. It’s a bit unclear. You have a model with a 500gb 2.5" sata hdd inside of it.
So, a 2.5" sata ssd will fit and work for sure. It replaces the hdd in the same space in the laptop body.
I’m seeing models of the same generation that shipped with a ssd pre-installed, with the M2 form factor. So I think the laptop has space for a M2 ssd as well. But, the ssd options that came with the laptop were all of the sata M2 variant (the ‘fake’ M2 SSDs from my story above). So I’m doubting if the laptop will support NVMe SSDs.
I’m also doubting if it will be worthwhile to chase this down. The laptop isn’t one of the fastest around. A SSD will always help in making the system feel more responsive and faster, but if it’s worth it to go above +/- 550mb/sec, I don’t think so. Your choice of course.
So you might have room for two SSDs in there. A 2.5" sata SSD will always fit.
If you really want to be sure a sata M2 SSD will fit, post pictures from the inside after opening up the bottom.
If a NVMe ssd will work, I doubt it. If you have a real complete model number (a SKU number or something, of this specific configuration. There were tons of ‘EliteBook 840 g2’ laptops across the years 
). Maybe something on a sticker at the bottom?
Do you have a favorite computer parts store where I can browse a bit (English?) to list some options that are in stock?
Like i said, the ‘crucial mx500’ series is always nice in sata laptops. But that series is available in both 2.5" sata version, and in M2 sata version. So you still need to watch what you are buying :).
I am mostly interested in the m2 solely because I haven’t gotten one before (there appears to be a space but it was covered, so I don’t know there connection) and I have no time to think about it or do the research. SSD and everything else is okay. If you have read any of my posts here, I have not lived under a rock and may be getting into IT soon depending on the screening/interview. No offense taken though, just letting you know.
Best Buy or Canada Computers would be my go-to walk-in stores. I am Canadian and apparently say sorry and eh all the time. 
If someone talks about anxiety about choosing pc parts, I start describing stuff. If you don’t want it, just skip over it, it’s all good :).
M2 ssd, sata connection is what I advise. It’s hard to tell if nvme will work, and I don’t think you’ll get much benefit from it in this machine.
https://www.canadacomputers.com/index.php?cPath=179_1927_1928&sf=:2_2,3_11,3_12&mfr=&pr=
I filtered on 500gb for no special reason. But you see that some models are crazy more expensive (Samsung 860 Evo, mx500… Probably because it are older models with less stock). The wd blue is not known to be a good performer.
But, good news. I think I found the HP support image for your odel series.
https://support.hp.com/id-en/document/c04552057
It lists a pci-e m2 ssd as an option. Which means you probably support NVMe gen3 Ssds.
In NVMe world, the ‘wd blue sn500’ is actually a good performing budget option, as are the Intel 660 models.
From a Dutch review site for reference :
It’s a trace (so a real world repeatable disk benchmark) that is doing some lightroom and photoshop actions.
You’ll see that modern Ssds are quickly all in the region ‘more than fast enough’ as long as it has some sort of on disk caching.
Sorry for the grumpiness earlier. Too much reading for my poor eyes and was dealing with a serious and urgent issue at the time of posting.
Findings: the slot is for a flash cache, supports SATA but requires a bios update that may or may not work and still not be bootable. According to various sources, it would likely a world of trouble since this laptop was conceived in a time of actualization for M.2. Also, the slot only has space for 42 and 60 mm lengths.
So I’m more and more leaning towards ‘get a 2.5" sata ssd’ according to budget.
It will work for sure, and they are still a massive upgrade from harddrives.
I just upgraded from a similar system.
Old one:
Xubuntu 18.04
AMD A8-7600 8GB RAM
NVIDIA GTX-1060 6GB
New one:
Xubuntu 20.04
AMD Ryzen 5600X, 16GB DDR4 RAM 3200
NVIDIA GTX-1060 6GB
Gave me an enourmous performance boost in darktable. When I edit a photo the calculation times are almost not noticeable.
There was a thread about darktable perfomance a while ago with a standardized RAW with XMP:
You just have to replace http with https in the original link for the files.
The last test with an older system was:
AMD® A8-7600 radeon r7, 4GB RAM
GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Today I tried the test again with the new Ryzen 5 system:
That’s quite a speed boost on the new system, even the OpenCL seems to be quicker!
I’m still tossing up CPU choices, Ryzen 7 3700X with 8 cores, 16 threads? Or drop down to Ryzen 5 5600X with 6 (faster?) cores, 12 threads?
AMDs CPU numbering system is somewhat confusing!
Anyway, current benchmark timings:
CPU: 37.665 secs (119.716 CPU)
OpenCL: 6.105 secs (11.185 CPU)
Not that confusing right? The 5xxx is newer and faster per core than the 3xxx series. For the money you can only decide if you are more served with more cores VS less but faster cores.
A few simple notes that maybe make it easier for you. If there is also gaming to be done on the machine, pick the 5600x, no question.
The 3700x is faster in tasks that utilize all cores, but only marginally. If there are a few moments in a task where not all cores can be utilized, the 5600x will perform equal or even better.
So for darktable, you might be better of with a 3700x, but the difference is so small that you might be better of with a 5600x overal.
You will not be buying a slow system in either of the two cases.
Edit: if there is also opencl and a gpu involved, the single core performance of the 5600x might be better suited to ‘feed’ the gpu, but im guessing here.
I would lean toward the newer chip but that’s just me. That is, if it works well with the other existing or prospective components AND with your linux box, software and firmware.
Anyway here is a bundle I’ve priced up based on a Ryzen 7, 3700X and 32gb of ram.
Motherboard is part of bundle, hence no price on it.
I have a laptop with Ryzen 9 5900HX and a discrete Radeon RX6800M. There’s no cdrom, no flash reader, just room for cooling inside. It seems to scream along. The style is for gaming, with the illuminating keyboard and side panel effects. I have mine set so that the cpu load shows up on the side panels, the cpu temp in the front, and a four out-of-phase undulating waves in the keycaps oscillating between blue-indigo-purple. It gives gently vibrant visibility in the dark. I’ve got it for course work until next year, when my daughter gets to have it.
8 cores, 16 logical cpu’s @ 3.3 GHz turbos up to 5GHz on demand. 
Although I thought that Ryzen 9 had 12 cores?
The desktop ‘X’ chip spec does, and it also eats 2x the power to run them.
