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Optiplex SFF 7050 How to add SATA hard drive?
I have a new Dell Optiplex SFF 7070 (7th gen Core-i5). It came with a 250GB SSD only. The empty hard drive caddy inside the machine is a 3.5" SATA hard drive caddy. When I install a 500GB SATA hard drive in the caddy the Optiplex doesn't recognize it.
The documentation states that the Optiplex SFF 7050 can support 1 SATA 3.5" hard drive in addition to the installed SSD boot drive. Are there settings in the BIOS that need to be changed? For example, I noticed that the BIOS is set to "RAD on" with only 1 drive installed in the machine. That doesn't seem tg make any sense.
I have to say, Dell's documentation on this subject is sorely lacking in detail.
jphughan
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January 3rd, 2018 21:00
You might have to go into the BIOS and enable the additional SATA port you're attempting to use for the additional drive. This may have changed in newer systems, but I remember some Dell systems defaulting to having all SATA ports disabled except those that had devices attached to them, and if you enabled SATA ports that didn't have anything attached, you got a warning about a "missing device" every time you booted. So look for something like that. If that's not it, poke around the various informational areas of the BIOS setup and see if you can find your hard drive being detected at a BIOS level. If so, then what exactly do you mean when you say that your system doesn't "recognize it"? If you're expecting a brand new hard drive to just appear in Windows with a drive letter all ready to go, that's not how it works. Empty hard drives have to be initialized, partitioned, and formatted before you get there, which has to be done through a method like using the Disk Management interface in Windows.
The "RAID On" setting has some technical and historical background behind it, but basically that just causes the attached storage devices to run through Intel's storage controller rather than being exposed as normal devices. Some of the reasons for this include to provide support for Intel Optane / Smart Response on systems that use it, and also to allow Windows 7 to run on NVMe SSDs, since Windows 7 does not have the native support required to run NVMe SSDs if they were exposed natively. If you only have a single SSD, then you certainly don't NEED the setting to be in "RAID On", but you probably can't change it on a live OS installation without jumping through hoops either, and in any case it wouldn't block your additional drive from appearing. Dell basically just uses "RAID On" as the shipping configuration for all of its systems because it's the most broadly compatible/capable setting as long as the Intel Rapid Storage drivers are supplied, which of course they are from the factory. If you were ever to do a clean install, there might be a case to be made for switching it to just AHCI since that might not require a driver when using "RAID On" would, but it's really not something to worry about in your case.