Trying to get Samsung 850 EV SSD 250Gb to be the boot drive on HP Z840

[DSTong]

I removed the 2nd CD/DVD (Read Only) drive and using a 2.5" to 3.5" carrier adapter installed the SSD.  The regular SAS/SATA drive bays are all full.  Using SATA cables I hooked the drive up, and I can see it, but  cannot make it the boot drive, because the boot settings of the BIOS are quite unclear, to me. At some point I had it working but it was really slow, possibly it was connecting as an ext USB drive, which is not what  I want.

I have tons of experience upgrading lots of machines (other than HP workstations) and it was always fairly simple to accomplish successfully. The HP Z840 is quite a different beast.

It boils down to these two specific questions:

1 Which SATA port should I connect to (as labelled on the motherboard) ?

2 How do I configure the BIOS setting for specific port (recommended in answer to above) so that I boot from the SSD ?

Thanks,

Dan

[y2ken]

Installing the SSD into your CD/DVD bay is not how I would have done it.

I suggest you 'clone' your old boot drive onto the new SSD then switch the old for the new to the same SATA connector.

OR back up the data on the old boot drive then install the new SSD onto the same SATA connector then perform a clean Windows install on the SSD. Then you could install your old drive as a data drive into the CD/DVD bay.

As a precaution I always unplug any other drives during the Windows install. 

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[DGroves]

reinstall windows with all other devices (except for the cd or usb key that has the win installer) this will insure that during the windows install only the single drive/ssd you want to install it on is visable

the cd rom can be installed in any of the 4  "SCU" ports if the factory restore disk or a disk with the nessary SCU driver slipstreamed into it, else use one of the two SATA ports that are next to the SCU ports (should be blue or grey)

the 7 ports that run along of the edge of the board are driven by the onboard LSI sas/sata chip, and again under win 7 require a factory restore disk or a win 7 disk with the LSI driver slipstreamed into it

windows 8 and up have builtin drivers for the LSI chip, and also for the SCU ports that are driven by the enterprise RSTe driver

look at the link below and note the locations of the ports, the SCU/SATA ports are numbered to show which is which

http://help.autodesk.com/view/FLAME/2017/ENU/?guid=GUID-D1990E12-DE1F-4916-BF88-B2C682F35D98

to recap there are two native SATA ports (no drivers nessary)

there are four more sata ports driven off the "SCU" that requires you install the correct intel RSTe driver for win 7/8

there are 7 LSI SAS/SCSI ports that requires a driver for win 7

both SCU and LSI drivers  should be included under win 10

win 7 requires specific patches to allow booting from a ssd, again you either need to use the factory win 7 restore disk or win 10 which has the nessary SSD driver support

bottom line use win 10, it's a lot less of a hassle!!