Can I add third hard drive to Pavilion HPE h9 currently have a solid state drive and SATA drive?

[dimchall]

HP Pavilion HPE h9 (Phoenix), win 7 64

Can I add a third SATA drive to my system?  The specs say three bays are available but when I ordered it I could not add a third drive (or a drive larger than 1 TB).  Is there something about the SSD that changes the drive bay spacing?  I'd rather not take the tower apart if there is no way to add another drive. 

[Big_Dave · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Please post the HP product number for your PC.

Did you review this article and video?  You will need to remove the hard drive cage to install the third hard drive. Typically the SSD is in the middle mounting location with 3.5" hard drives on either side.  The hard drive cage is fabricated for three hard drives.

The specifications do indicate theprovisioning for three hard drives on this particular model. The cabinet appears to be the same as the other two HPE H9 models.

[dimchall]

Thanks Big Dave,

The model number is h9-1170t

I just wanted to double check before opening it up.  for whatever reason HP wouldn't let me customize with the three hard drives if one was an SSD so I didn't know if somehow the SSD took up more space or something. 

[LarryMeBoy]

I have the h9-1170t with the liquid cooling and the Radeon 6850 and it is a bit crowded to work in the Phoenix case. I bought a 5 1/4" to 3.5"  bracket to put a 3.5" disk in my extra 5 1/4 drive bay. That way I wouldn't have to get take the disk basket out. The disk basket, though, will take a third drive.

Larry

[dimchall]

Larry that is brilliant.

[LarryMeBoy]

The latest Shop Now CTO webpage for the h9-1170t only allows 1 primary and 1 secondary disk drive in the order. Also 32 GBs of DDR3 memory (4 DIMMS) are available for this model now. That would indicate to me that the Pittsburgh motherboard has been abandoned for a different motherboard.

Larry