Adding SSD to Z1 Workstation

[TomCole]

Thanks, Scott

8.00 am here, and I am off to catch a plane.

Thom

[TomCole]

Good Morning Scott and Captain WD

Had a frustrating weekend trying to burn Acronis Bootable Media and/or Acronis Universal Restore onto a DVD-RW and failed miserably - all sorts of error messages.  "The drive is busy", "Installation failed", etc.   Really frustrating; seemingly so inconsistent!

So, this morning tried to instal both onto USB thumb drives - instant success.

Then cloned entire HDD onto external HDD; shut down, replaced the internal HDD with the new SSD, restarted from the USB thumbdrive and cloned the external HDD back onto the SSD.  Closed down.

Restarted and everything seems to be operating properly, albeit substantially faster than before.

So far have tried the following:

• email - Moz Thunderbird
• web browsing - Firefox
• Word
• Excell
• Powerpoint
• Rhino 5
• Autocad
• Picasso
• Acrobat Reader

I am nervous;  everything seems OK.

Thank you so much for your very able assistance and incredible patience.

Best Regards

Thomas

[TomCole]

One tiny discovery from the drawn out saga was that the HP Maintenance Manual was not quite correct when it specified the capacity of the two different HDD carriers or cradles for the Z1 workstation.  At p.46 the manual says:

• The workstation requires one of the following supported carriers:
  ◦ 671193-001 supports one 3.5-in hard drive
  ◦ 671192-001 supports one or two 2.5-in hard drives
• Combining a 2.5-in hard drive and 3.5-in hard drive is not possible.

Carrier 671193-001 also supports one 2.5-in hard drive;  The bracket holding the 2.5" drive just snaps into the pre-drilled holes in the carrier - it is what I did.

I suspect that carrier 671192-001 will also support a single 3.5" drive as it too plugs into the same holes.

Tom

[SDH]

Tom,

That is great news!  And, good info on the ability to use the same carrier for both 3.5 and 2.5" drives, making it an easier task to convert from HDD to SSD.

Remember to do that process of Disk Cleanup, and thereafter Error Checking (with both boxes checked) soon.  That tunes up your SSD (and HDD) and I do both of those steps monthly.  With SSDs the Error Checking is so much faster than with a HDD.  Don't forget to load the latest Intel Toolbox, 3.3.3, and tune up your SSD with that now.

For those who are not familiar with Acronis it allows you to build a bootable removable media (I use CD media because I can't accidentally erase or modify those).  I have one that almost always works, built from the Linux boot OS approach.  That has seen a small number of HP workstations where it could not boot from the particular HP optical drive in place.  In that case I use my second CD, based on Windows OS boot, and that has never failed me.  The first is faster, however.

Note that there are some HP optical drives that I have seen that are not able to even load W7Pro64 from the Microsoft official system builder DVD.  That is very rare, but it does happen.  In the older HP workstations that came with IDE optical drives I seem to never hit that issue.... only on some older HP SATA optical drives.  It has to do with the driver for those just not being available on the DVD, or the optical drive having a firmware that is incompatible.  I have cross flashed a particular HP DVD ROM from HP to Dell firmware update, and that let it work properly in our HP workstations forever after.  This is a tip I've posted about every once in awhile because it is so odd, and good to get out there.

If you have any pictures to post of that one size fits all drive sled it would be nice to share that.  I truly feel every workstation booting off a HDD should actually be converted over to SSD now, so taking that issue off the table may help others go ahead.

Finally, I wanted to let you know I did the experiment here for you:  I burned my .iso of my favorite Acronis bootable CD over to a thumb drive.  Also hooked up an external external drive using another USB port.  I booted off the Acronis USB drive, with a good bootable W7Pro64 HDD inside the workstation, targeted to the external USB HDD, saved the Acronis image, swapped in a spare single partition NTFS long formatted SSD, booted from the Acronis USB thumb drive, and burned the image onto the internal SSD.  The outcome was perfect, with the system-reserved and the main partitions from the original HDD working on the SSD now..... the original HP OEM COA (activated on that original internal HDD) works just fine also on the clone internal SSD without any need for reactivation.

That process lets you avoid having your original Z1 HDD in place and a SSD hanging outside simultaneously.

Scott

[TomCole]

Thanks, Scott

Have now upgraded Intel Toolbox from 3.3.0 to 3.3.3 and tuned the SSD.   Will schedule DisClean and Error Checking monthly before offsite Backup.   Have also switched of Defrag.

Apparently, I also hit one of those optical drive anomolies with Acronis and HP.   But the USB ThumbDrive version of the Bootable Media worked fine so all is well,  I think!

Here are some updates photos:

The first shows HP Cradle or Carrier Part # 671193-001 (left) plus (right) the Intel SSD screw mounted on the 3.5/2.5 inch Adaptor part # 654540-001.  The four pins on the blue lugs on the Carrier snap into the holes on the Adaptor to mount same.   You can see that the Carrier is only half height.   Presumably the other Carrier part # 671192-001 is full height and has two sets of these four lugs to mount two x 2.5 inch drives.

This shows the SSD in the Adaptor mounted in the Carrier part # 671193-00, but still sitting on my desk.

The SSD in the Adaptor in the Carrier now reinstalled in the computer.

Its not quite one-size-fits-all;  I still cannot install a second drive, SSD or HDD, in the half height Carrier.

Now with a couple of days experience with the SSD I must agree that every workstation booting off a HDD should actually be converted over to SSD now.  In fact, every computer should convert - they are just so much faster.   However, there is probably still a role for bulk data storage, especially videos, music and photos, on HDD whils everyone still has HDD's lying around and until SSD's drop further in price.

Thanks again

Tom

PS:  I had an email about the spelling of my name and it relates back to my very elderly mother who absolutely hates it being truncated - "We did not name you with that abomination....." - so when she is hovering and in the interest of world peace I include the "h".  No one else does.

[SDH]

Thom,

I don't want to get in trouble with your mother.......

Great pics, and you are helping a bunch of other Z1 owners with your sharing.  Here is a bit more:

First, I have liked the 2.5" form factor 500GB Seagate Momentus XT 7200 RPM drive.... if you ever go to having your SSD and a HDD (both 2.5" form factors) in your Z1.

Here is how to optimize for that, working with the "Libraries" and separating things properly so your SSD stays freed up for OS and program files, and the HDD is used for documents storage.  The author is very good, and the president of that company which is well respected in my neck of the woods:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/support-software/Moving-Windows-7-8-Libraries-184/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/How-it-works-Windows-7-Libraries-88/

Scott

[TomCole]

Thanks Scott

I have noted that for when for when I need to increase my storage capacity.

At present Toolbox says I am using 110 GB on the new SSD with 366 GB free.  As I do not collect movies or music or other storage intensive stuff, hopefully by the time I need more GB's then the price of SSD's will be more competitive.

She's Visiting a friend at present.

Tom