Tools and notes for working with HPE M510 Moonshot cartridges.
The HPE ProLiant M510 is a small blade-like cartridge computer that can be used with several chassis in the HPE Moonshot family, including the 45-slot 4.3U Moonshot 1500 chassis, the 4-slot 1U EL4000 chassis, and the 1-slot EL1000.
The M510 comes with either an 8- or 16-core Broadwell Xeon D CPU, 4 DIMM slots, and room for up to 3 M.2 SSDs (2 NVMe, 1 SATA).
- Samsung 32GB PC4-2400T-R DDR4 ECC RDIMM (M393A4K40BB1-CRC0Q)
This is what I had at hand, and have used with other Xeon-D boards. Seems to work fine. HP's iLO correctly identifies it as non-HPE RAM, but doesn't otherwise complain.
- Samsung 970 EVO
- Sabrent Rocket 4.0
I suspect that anything sane will work fine.
Many used M510 cartridges come without heatsinks or the mounting base plate that holds the heatsinks in place. Replacement HPE heat sinks are generally unavailable online, and (as of February 2021) list for more than the current selling price of M510 cartridges.
The heatsink base plate also contains the mounting points for the M.2 cards on the bottom side of the cartridge. So, without a baseplate, there's no safe way to mount M.2s.
I have been working on sourcing a workable replacement for both the heatsink and the baseplate. As of March 2021, they both seem to work well enough for my uses.
For the base plate, I've designed a custom 3D-printable version and included a STL here. This is designed to connect to the heatsink using M3 screws which thread directly into the plastic of the baseplate. I'd generally prefer to use threaded brass inserts, but there is only a tiny amount of clearance between the baseplate and the second DIMM slot, and every single brass insert that I can find is too thick.
The plate can be printed on any 3D printer, although the M510 may get hot enough for PLA to fail. I ended up having Shapeways print a few using SLS-fused nylon for around $15 each. Printing in ABS would almost certainly be fine and be much cheaper.
The baseplate has room for up to 3 M.2 SSDs. The two NVMe-compatible slots have screw holes for 2280 and 22110 cards. One of them also has a hole for a 2260 M.2. In addition, the SATA M.2 slot can fit either a 2242 or 2260 card. The M.2 cards should be screwed in using a short M2 screw with a plastic washer. Either 3mm or 4mm screws should work when used with a washer.
Here's what I'm using, but any similar screw should work.
Make sure that you screw doesn't go throught the baseplate and into the motherboard. The baseplate is 3mm thick and M.2s are generally 1mm thick, so a 4mm screw+washer is the maximum that should be used.
The baseplate was designed in Fusion 360. My design is available if you wish to make modifications.
I was unable to find any pre-made heatsinks with the right hole placement, so I ordered a batch of semi-custom heatsinks from Alpha. They cut one of their standard heatsink stocks down to size, milled 4 holes, shaved 1mm off the thickness, annodized the whole thing, and added a thermal interface to the back, all for around $35 each quantity 5.
They assigned this heatsink a part number of S08EKD03-A. It should
be possible to order additional copies of this part number directly
from them without involving me at all. If ordered in quantity, the
price drops quite a bit; quantity 50 they're under $10 each.
This revision of the heatsink is slightly wider than it should probably be, as it interferes slightly with the second DIMM on the CPU side of the M510 board. If you wish to use both DIMMs, then you'll probably need to remove the heatsink in order to install the second DIMM, although you can re-install it after and it should barely clear the top of the DIMM. See image below.
To mount the heatsink, I used 12mm M3 screws. These specific ones are designed for screwing into plastic and work fine, although 11mm screws would be better. 10mm is too short to get started. Adding a washer would probably limit how far the screws protrude in the back.
Additional resources: