Can a PCIe SATA III card be used on a 2.5" SSD (boot drive) to achieve 6.0/gbps on a HP Z600

[MoonMilk]

Hello everyone! New member here and I've got a rather obscure question! So, I've got an old HP Z600 and I've been slowly upgraded it the past few months. I just bought this card, a Startech 2x M.2 NGFF SSD RAID Controller Card plus 2X SATA III Ports, with the hopes of connecting my 2.5" SSD to it. Right now, the SSD is connected to a SATA II port in the drive bay. My goal here is to improve the speed of my boot disk SSD using the card. The PCIe card seems to be working - I bought one M.2 NGFF SSD and it works great. The SATA III port I'm unable to get working, though.

So, I installed the card, installed the M.2 SSD, downloaded drivers, etc, etc. Then, finally, I tried connecting the 2.5" SSD to the SATA III card, rebooted the system and got this error message on a black screen

BOOTMGR is missing

Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart

I was missing the 4-pin floppy power connector the card suggested so maybe that was the problem? I did some research though and apparently, the Z600 can only do a boot from a PCIe card using specific cards? Is that correct?

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/Sata-3-pci-card-fo...

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/Add-SATA3-drives-t...

Is the card I picked up no good? Is it not possible to use it to boot my 2.5" SSD? Some of the cards mentioned on those threads are pretty cheap now but I have to wonder how easy it might be to set up a 6.0/gbps connection. I'm super new to PC upgrading and don't feel very confident messing around with the bios, drives and stuff. I was hoping things would be plug and play for the most part 😅 Is it complicated? Anyone here have experience on it?

Hope everything was clear! If this idea doesn't work, I might return the products and get a dual NVME adapter. I was really hoping to improve the boot drive speeds, though. Anyway, thanks for reading my post - I'd appreciate any assistance.

[banhien]

@MoonMilk 

Firstly PCIe and SATA III are not the same. SATA III controllers use same speed 6.0gbps but normal mechanical HDD's are slower due to they have to spin therefore they take more time to seek, transfer ...... SATA II controllers are slower, only 3.0mbps

You are saying "The PCIe card seems to be working - I bought one M.2 NGFF SSD and it works great" why not use it ?  If you wish to use SATA III card, you have to buy a different adapter.

Regards.

[MoonMilk]

Thanks for the reply! Perhaps I didn't explain myself correctly. Essentially, I want to do this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzV4f0UVpnc&t=248s

I want to use the SATA III controller on the PCIe card I bought to improve the speed of my 2.5" SSD boot drive - just like in the YT video. I'm not doing anything with a normal mechanical HDD. The reason I selected this card was due to its multiple functions. If I can't use this card, could you recommend a SATA III controller that would suit my needs? Thanks!

[banhien]

---

@MoonMilk wrote:

I want to use the SATA III controller on the PCIe card I bought to improve the speed of my 2.5" SSD boot drive !

---

@MoonMilk 

No, you won't get better speed, you already have my 2.5" SSD boot drive. Only M.2 NVMe PCIe x3 or x4 helps and you are saying PCIe card works.

Regards.