Adding SSD to Z1 Workstation

[TomCole]

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@SDH wrote:

Your SATA to USB bridge is keeping the SSD from being seen as a SATA bus device.

I'd try the spare workstation approach I posted about before.... it will be easy if you have a spare but you might not.

You also could try a USB-attached external HDD, .........

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Thank you Scott

Silly me;  I thought the purpose of the SATA to USB Bridge was to facilitate SSD being seen and communicated with.   Is there some way to remove this blockage?   Could it be related to that apparently elderly Microsoft driver?

Unfortunately, I do not have another workstation nor another HDD.   Could I use a USB3 thumbdrive?

I'll respond to your second post separately;  it looks promising.

Tom

[SDH]

Tom,

You're seeing why I have settled on eSATA for these projects.  My eSATA external drives are on the SATA bus.... just as much as an internal SATA drive.  There are cables that let you have eSATA plug on one end and the female normal SATA on the other, so if my workstation has an eSATA port on the backplane then I can directly connect a bare SATA SSD or HDD to the SATA bus, with use of an external power supply, fed to the HDD or SSD SATA power connector.  For this type of work you want to use a short high quality cable....  Or, I use a high quality external eSATA drive case from OWC or G-Drive and a Molex brand eSATA to eSATA cable. 

Your old driver is a USB driver.... that is not the issue.  For SSDs on modern OS such as W7 and on you don't need a special driver..... the OS install will have what you need in reserve.  The Intel ToolBox is a SSD utility.... current version is 3.3.3, and you can tune up your SSD install some with that, run TRIM, and update firmware easily.

If you look at the rear end of a HDD or a SSD you'll see that the interfaces there are male SATA data and male SATA power.  What they mate to is usually a SATA interconnect cable, which has female on each end, and the SATA port on the motherboard usually is male too.  With the Foxconn BlindMate interface that HP uses in your Z1 and in the rear end of the drawers for the Z620, etc, is a female connector for both power and data.

Hence, the SSD's male end can plug directly into that female BlindMate receiver.  This means that you'd need a SATA extension cable to try to get the SATA data port fed outside of the Z1.... male on one end (to plug into the BlindMate SATA data part) and female other end (to plug into the rear of the SSD).

Those exist.... I have looked that up, but have never needed to buy one.

Regarding using an external source of power rather than getting the power to the SSD from the Z1 itself.  I have used external power supplies for exactly this purpose for years now, and with never a problem.

Scott

p.s.  I can tell you that by now I'd have done a clean install from scratch.  However, have done that at least 500 times over the last 8 years on my projects here, so it is pretty much auto-pilot.  I had to start from ground zero over and over to finally figure out some patterns that failed and worked.

[TomCole]

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@SDH wrote:

Just had a thought looking at your latest picture.

You mention one can run 2 2.5" form factor drives.  That means that there are two SATA ports available to you.  One will be SATA port 0 to which you are supposed to hook up your boot drive.  The second will be SATA port 1.

Thus, you can hook up your hdd externally with a longer SATA data cable, and your ssd also .................

You are correct Scott.

There are two SATA ports in the diskbay, but if a 3.5" drive is installed, then it partially obstructs the top SATA port 1.  I considered your suggestion plus also a variation of it, as follows:

• Remove the HDD and connect it to the bottom SATA Port 0 by SATA cable and also to the power source,
• Put the SSD in the bracket and insert it onto the top SATA Port 1.

So I openned the computer case and had a good look inside.

1. The disk drive bay showing the 3.5" HDD in place.

2.  The SSD sitting on the HDD in situ.  Note that the SSD plug does not quite align with the SATA socket.

3.  The drive bay with the cradle and HDD removed.  Two SATA sockets visible.

4.  The cradle and HDD have been reinstalled and the Intel SSD has been plugged directly into the SATA socket or Port 1.  The SATA socket has rotated a little on its plastic mounting lugs so that it aligns adequately for a very temporary data transfer.  [In Photo 2 above, I had the SSD upsidedown!

I then closed the case and switched on the power.

Now, while it is temporarily installed in SATA Port 1 the SSD is visible as follows:

• BIOS - visible as "Hard Disk - SATA 1,  480GB,  Intel SSDSC2BW480H6."   Note:  BIOS describes it as a hard disk, but calls the DVD drive a DVD drive.
• DOS - Visible as "Disk 1, Status=Online,  Size=447GB,  Free=447GB."
• Device Manager - Visible in "Disk Drives => Intel SSDSC2BW480H6 SCSI Disk Devise and Devise Status=This device is working properly" and is otherwise the same as when it was connected via the USB except that POLICIES has changed from "Allow unplugging" to "Enable write caching on the device..."

The SSD is no longer visible in DEVICES AND PRINTERS => DEVICES.

The SSD is still not visible in Disk Management.

Thus, I still do not have any way of writing to the SSD.  

I am further suspecting that the problems is the driver;  does it pre-date SSD's  ??   Or is it simply not plug-and-play and I need to go through some formal installation ritual?

I thought that I had a break through, but now I am in my normal state of confusion.

Tom

[Captain_WD]

You should be able to use the drive as it is. Are you able to connect the SSD to another computer externally or internally and see if it's visible there. Check if the drive is online and if its initialized. If the drive doesn't work on another PC then it may be a DOA one and needs replacement.

Post back when you check this!

Captain_WD.

[SDH]

You are having a tough go of it.  Are you sure you don't have a friend there who is good enough with computers to help you?  Or, who at least could take that SSD and do a proper NTFS long-type format on it?

Your SSD likely came to you "bare" with a raw condition and no formatting.  So, it would be ready for Windows or Apple or etc. formatting.  When a drive is like that then in Disk Management there usually is a series of windows you go through to get to the NTFS long-type of formatting.

You can download and burn free DBAN onto CD, which is bootable, and run that to do a low level format of your SSD to get it back to raw status if you somehow messed it up with your earlier actions.  On any used drive I always do that and then long type NTFS to form a single partition, even if I know I'll be loading W7 and above, which will always want to place their important small system reserved partition in place.

DBAN low level formatting is not an OS format..... it just gets everything back to raw.  It has fixed more issues than I can count.... server OS on 3TB drive not letting me NTFS format-fixed.  WD Red NAS drives that would not work right on W7-fixed.  Apple formatted drives that would not let me NTFS format-fixed.  And on.....  After that when you plug the SSD in and navigate to it with Disk Management you'll see the series of windows that DM goes through to first create a parititon and then you need to format that partition.  Use the defaults there for NTFS, and do not do a Quick format.  I assume you know you can burn a CD/DVD .iso file such as DBAN from within W7..... I always check the little verify box when doing that.

I would not close up the case at this phase.... unless you have to.  You don't want to jostle things around by doing that while your drives are not fully secured.

[TomCole]

BREAK THROUGH

With the SSD "temporarily installed" as per the above post (Picture 4) I revisited Disk Management and the SSD was now visible as "Disk 1 - 447.13 GB  -  Unallocated".

I clicked on Disk 1 and an install wizzard appeared so I ran that creating a simple volume (no partitions), named the drive s:\ (For SSD), file system NTFS and unticked the quick format box, so I presume it did a long format.

Voilà, the SSD is now visible and accessible. 

To test it, I saved a few Word and Excell files to the SSD and then retrieved them.  All seems to be working well.

Captain WD, I could not see the SSD when installed externally on a laptop and I was hesitant to install the SSD in my old desktop - a 10+ year old Dell running Win XP with a very unreliable HDD. Luckily I did not need to.

Scott;  I think events have overtaken your latest suggestions.  I presume the Win7 format adequate, or  I need not do the DBAN formatting.   The Disk Management now reads as follows:

 I guess the SYSTEM is a 2 GB partition on the HDD and that this was done automatically as Win7 was installed? 

My intentions now, after I catch up on some other matters, is to:

ONE - Clone the entire HDD, programs and data, to the SSD and then remove the HDD.

TWO - If this fails, then reformat the SSD and do fresh install of everything.

THREE - around Easter, upgrade to Win10.

Again, yet again, thank you for all your help and reassurance.

Tom

[SDH]

Well, congrats!

Here's some tips.  First, you don't need to use DBAN now... it sounds like you had an issue with use of Disk Management, and you have got past that and your single-parition SSD up and running.  This is the foundation for either a clone install or a clean install.

Second, the modern MS operating systems from 7 up  want a special "system reserved" partition that the install makes automatically if you do things correctly.  I'm going to assume that your HDD is W7, and that the install came from HP.  That means if you look at that drive with Disk Managment you'll see the HDD having a large partition, a small system reserved partition of about 100MB, and perhaps a system restore partition.    If you use Acronis to capture an image from that HDD (onto your external USB attached spare hard drive?) then when you clone back with Acronis to the SSD from the captured image you'll have all partitions cloned onto the SSD and all will work fine simply by booting from the SSD.  I always do a disk check from the system tools, both boxes checked, at this stage.

Third, the special system reserved partition has grown.  W10 puts one on that is 500MB from a clean W10 install.  If you do a clean install from a W7 Pro System Builder DVD you want to be careful at the beginning.... don't install directly onto the single NTFS partition you currently have.  Early on in the process you'll have the option to delete that partition and the system will let you know that it may make a special system reserved partition.  Let it do that..... and all else will go fine.  Don't delete that system reserved partition later regardless of what you might read on the net from the old days.

You're about half way done.

[Captain_WD]

Congrats from me too!

I'd listen to SDH's suggestions and advice as they are very good.
Another point that I can make is DO KEEP BACKUPS OF WHATEVER YOU PUT ON THE DRIVE. With all the issues during the initializing and formatting the drive you might encounter drive dropouts or even RAW state which is quite tricky to fix in a SSD. Make sure the drive and the controller have all the latest updates (but do read what the updates include first) and you should be safe (with the backups of course). 🙂

Post back if you need more help!

Captain_WD.

[TomCole]

Thanks Guys

The backup message has been received loud and clear.  I will effectively have three backups:

• routine data backup on DVD's,
• pre-cloning backup on USB thumbdrive,
• the original HDD should not be altered and will be retained and not used.

In addition, I have the Product keys and/or disks for for all installed software.   I think I am adequately protected.

Your assumption is correct, Scott.  My workstation has Windows 7 Pro 64-bit pre-installed by HP.  In my last post I included a jpeg picture of the Disk Magagement but it disappeared. Will try again:

This indicates that the HDD has only two partitions, one of 2GB for SYSTEM of which only a small part is used.

I will be absent working tomorrow, so hopefully I can proceed on Friday.  (We seem to be about 18 hours ahead of you;  this was posted about 10.00pm Wednesday, 17-2-2016.)

Thanks again.

Thom

[SDH]

On all the cases where I've gone from a functioning HDD install to an Acronis image capture and then clone build onto a SSD I have not triggered a need to reactivate the W7 install or re-enter software activation codes.  Those all come over in the clone process.

There may be a few drivers that get auto-installed from the hidden W7 driver archive built into the OS install.  I have not needed to download any drivers from the net for this type of transition.

I do recommend doing Disk Cleanup monthly from C:\ Properties\ General tab, including its "More options" System Restore and Shadow Copies cleanup.  This can take a while the first time.  Then also to to the Tools tab and check both boxes for Error-checking and restart.  Do that also monthly, and a general rule.  I'd do that on the HDD before you capture its image, and also do both shortly after you get the SSD installed, in that order each time you do that.