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Archived This topic has been archived. Information and links in this thread may no longer be available or relevant. If you have a question create a new topic by clicking here and select the appropriate board.

‎05-16-2016 04:01 PM

HP Recommended
Product: Elite 8300 SFF
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 (64-bit)

Is it possible to have THREE hard drives in my elite 8300 SFF?

 

I currently have two spinning disks (500 gb each).

 

I would like to add a 250 GB SSD

 

Is this doable?

 

And can I clone my primary (OS) disk onto an SSD?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

1 REPLY 1

‎05-17-2016 12:13 PM

HP Recommended

You state you have two 500GB HDD in place already.  I'd bet you also have an optical drive in place, which will be a SATA device.

 

There is a nice HP 3.5" form factor to 5.25" optical bay converter I finally tracked down and posted about in my recent forum post about adding HP USB3 card into workstations, here.

 

http://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/Add-HP-USB-3-0-card...

 

So, this would be a reasonable way to go, and you can buy an inexpensive USB2 external case for your internal HP optical drive, and attach it only when needed.  Other World Computing has had some inexpensive but quality cases for that, with SATA to USB2 bridging.  You likely will benefit in compatibility with USB2 instead of a USB3 external case.....

 

So, that should take care of what sounds like 3 internal SATA connectors that your SFF seems to have.

 

How to convert your boot drive to SSD?

 

I'm hoping your boot drive is the HP drive it came with so you have all you want and need properly, on that drive, including the small "System Reserved" partition that is important.  And, that you are running that drive with BIOS set to RAID + AHCI so you get the benefit of the proper drivers also for SSD.

 

I have posted in here about my use of Acronis to capture images from a HDD, and then clone that image over to a SSD.  The software can upsize or downsize to fit the SSD as needed, assuming what is on your HDD is less than the size of the SSD.  That is, if you have 200GB on your 500GB HDD I'd go for a 300GB or larger SSD.

 

I don't know if your boot drive is SATA Gen II or III.  If it is II I'd recommend the Intel 320 series 300GB off eBay.  They are an older SSD, but rock solid.  Get the Intel Toolbox software for its management.

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