That is a very valuable discovery..... From checking on multiple HP workstations after seeing your post it appears that all those PCI slots had Option ROM Download set to Enable as the default. Thus, it looks like you got unlucky and someone in the past had switched that option to Disable for some reason. However, this is a critical discovery to know about.
For those who want to see this on their workstations.... F10 into BIOS and go over to the Advanced tab on the far right. All the slots are listed down in the bottom area of that column.
In my research on the Predator from Kingston (a M.2 AHCI-controller SSD using a PCIe adapter card to mount that on the PCIe bus) I discovered that one of its special characteristics is an Option ROM built in to the M.2 component. That is not common for M.2 SSDs, and when I looked into that the OPROM coding is considered helpful for a device to be bootable. That is, if there is an OPROM available for BIOS to interface with then the chances of a successful boot from the device are greatly increased. The OPROM coding that Kingston created is an interface so that the AHCI drivers from the OS can interface unusually well with the Predatir M.2 PCIe device..... M.2 devices are native PCIe, so it may not be that complex of an OPROM. NVMe is much less complex than AHCI, but AHCI can work with legacy BIOS, and we'll never have non-legacy BIOS for these ZX00 HP workstations and the xw generation of HP workstations I'm also experimenting with.
My guess is that if you ask the Other World Computing guys they have their own custom OPROM firmware chip in the two pieces of hardware you showed.
Regarding that Storage Controller driver I recommended, the older 9.x you are now using. I captured an Acronis image off one of my Z600 builds running that driver, cloned the image onto my new Predator, and it booted up perfectly the first time. I then updated the source Z600 build to the 11.x Storage Controller driver, re-imaged, re-cloned, and re-booted. Got the blue screen instantly just as the boot was leaving BIOS and transitioning over to the OS phase of boot. I then re-cloned back onto the same exact hardware with no changes to BIOS etc. (now again using the 9.x driver) and rebooted..... rock solid. So, it really seems to be a driver issue at least for the Predator M.2 PCIe SSD, in my mind. This assumes you have the slot properly set to the default so that the boot process accepts the OPROM that the device wants to give it. I have no idea yet whether your two devices would have worked fine also with the 11.x driver you originally had.
Again, your discovery is key to this all working correctly. Re "Compute"..... I have not found what that means either.....
