Unsolved
This post is more than 5 years old
3 Posts
0
57217
June 10th, 2015 00:00
adding an SSD drive into optical bay
Hi
i owe a dell precision M4700 (MID 2012) with the following config:
PROCESSOR, I7-3840QM, 2.8, 4C, IVY, E1, P
NO RAID, VANS15/17
it came with one SSD drive and a DVD writable drive.
i am trying to add a second HDD(an SSD drive) instead of the DVD but it doesnt seem to work as it should.
i got the HDD Caddy from "newmodeus.com" online store.
i took out the DVD , put in the caddy with the new SSD drive attached boot up windows 8.1 and so far everything has been good, the bios detected the drive in the Caddy as "system device bay" the OS detected the drive as a second hard drive and it seemed like plug and play upgrate.
but here is the problem, the Caddy SSD functions (performance wise) as it was a regular 7200 RPM hard drive.
doing banchmark on the second SSD provides 100mb write and read speed.
i performed a secured erase using the SSD company utility performed "SMART" checks and all attributes are enable .
could it be that something is blocking the Caddy from getting the necessary voltage or power resource ? originally the DVD sata 2 port was getting a voltage to a DVD ROM, now there is an SSD in that bay so maybe the SATA 2 port still functions in a low voltage mode?
or maybe the SATA port is still configured by the system as an IDE?
i would like to just know if a second hard drive (in my case an SSD) can be added to the optical bay and actually function as SSD because the optical bay sits on SATA 2.
thanks
DELL-Terry B
6 Operator
•
3.5K Posts
0
June 11th, 2015 12:00
SATA 3 devices are backwards compatible with SATA 2 but performance will be restricted to the SATA 2 levels. I don't believe that Dell offered the option for a SSD drive on the media bay and this may well be the reason. In theory the drive should work fine but you are likely not going to get the same speeds as the primary drive.
TB
activenet38
3 Posts
0
June 13th, 2015 03:00
Hi and thanks for your response
DELL-Terry B
6 Operator
•
3.5K Posts
0
June 15th, 2015 09:00
There isn't any toggles that I am aware of that will change the speed of the options bay port, the only thing in the BIOS that I was able to find is an option to turn the bay on and off. If you haven't already I would test the SSD on another system and see if you get better speeds. If possible test the caddy with another drive or even another system and find out where the problem follows, the drive, the caddy or the precision.
If you can verify that the SSD and caddy is fine and capable of much higher speeds its possible that the system board on the notebook may be defective, and that you will want to consider a service. Just keep in mind that this may not be defect and the system is working as designed and you will not be able to get higher performance even after swapping out the system board.
activenet38
3 Posts
0
June 15th, 2015 21:00
Hi
so i was finally able to get the caddy SSD to work.
ive installed win 7x64 with bios setup as raid but i didnt use the embedded controller.
once i get windows up to date i opened disk management, formatted the bay SSD as NTFS but instead of using the default format settings i manually set 4096 allocation unit size and also checked "allow compress files"
banchmark was giving me 400\500 mbs on the caddy drive. now all this process was done on an individual SSD that was not part of a raid aray.
then, i installed intel RST, built raid0 and performance were as the aray had a single drive. 500\500
intead of 900\900.
conclusion:
the bay controller works as sata and pata.
the caddy works
the drive SMART is enable
something is changing the bay SSD config once its added to a raid
any thoughts?