Adding a new hard drive on e9180t

[CnH4Eva]

Hi, I have e9180t and I am considering adding a new hard drive.

Can my desktop handle 3 TB /  6.0GB/s 64MB Cache SATA Internal hard drive?  Will I get my full performance out of it?

I read the possible combinations in the specification page  (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01817977&tmp_task=prodinfoCategory&cc=us&dlc=en...

Is there a limitation to hard drive capacity?  (up to 2 TB?)

Can it handle 6.0 GB/s tansfer rate?

I currently have the following 2 hard drives :

  1TB    - Barracuda                         (st31000528as) 7200 RPM 32MB  SATA 3.0Gb/s    
  500 GB - Maxtor DiamondMax 21 (STM3500630AS) 7200 RPM 16MB  SATA 3.0Gb/s

If I were to buy 3 TB /  6.0GB/s  hard drive and use it as a primary hard drive, will I be able to use these two hard drives as a secondary hard drives?

Thank you!

[banhien]

Hi,

1. Don't install 3TB HDD on this machine, the machine may not see it, keep at 2TB and under.

2. No

3. Yes, but not with 3TB

Regards.

[old_geekster]

CnH4Eva welcome to the forum. I believe that Vista will support the 3TB drive, but I don't believe that the hard drive controller will support the 6 Gb/s rate. The hard drives listed in the specs are all 3 Gb/s.

[CnH4Eva]

right...  I was wondering if this is was hardware limitation... or it wasn't listed simply because 6.0GB/s transfer rate was not available when the specification was published... 

[CnH4Eva]

This is what I found :

The motherboard supports four SATA connectors:

• Supports 1 SATA-300 or SATA-150 disk drive on each SATA connector
• Speed up to 3.0Gb/sec or 1.5Gb/sec, complying with SATA 2.0 and SATA 1.0 specifications

NOTE: The faster rate of 3.0Gb/sec requires that both the hard drive and the motherboard support it. If one or the other does not support 3.0 Gb/sec, the PC negotiates down to the slower 1.5 Gb/sec.

So it seems like the maximum speed I can get out of it is 3.0 Gb/sec.

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

Check with the hard drive manufacturer and see if there is a driver available that will allow you all you to use a 3TB hard drive.  The bios on your PC will not natively support 3TB but some manufacturers do have work arounds.

[CnH4Eva · Accepted solution]

For those who might be interestd, this is what I have found after some digging and calling :

Since the motherboard that comes with e9180t (ipmtb-tk) is SATA 2, its speed is limited to 3.0 Gb/s.   When 6.0Gb/s hard drive is connected, the speed will slow down to 3.0 Gb/s.

You can utilize the full 3TB capabity only if your motherboard bios has option to support UEFI interface.  However, most of the motherboards built prior to 2011 does NOT have this option.  ipmtb-tk is one of them.  However, there is a work around.

1.  Go to the bios and verify that the interface is set to AHCI (not RAID).

2.  When the disk partition is loaded, you will only be able to partition 2TB.  other partition 750GB would appear a separate partition that you cannot change.  Partition the 2TB the way you want and install Windows 7 on it.

3.  After installatin is done, download Seagate's Disk Wizard.  The latest one from their homepage did not work, however.  You have to download this one :

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/downloads/discwizard/DiscWizardSetup-14382.en.exe

I don't know why they don't have this as the default link on their home page when you go to DiscWizard download.

Once the disk wizard is installed, it'll pick up the 750 GB that you weren't able to partition before as a new disk and will now allow you to partition it.   (Keep the setting as MBR instead of GPT, format it as NTFS)

Once you partition using the tool, viola!  a new disk with 750GB of space has been added as a new drive.