How to Disable or Replace SSD Cache Drive

[Musepuckl11]

Hello,

I am wondering how to disable the 16GB cache drive on this machine. It is defect, the machine is not booting up. It is the main machine in a small business and urgently needed.

HP support diagnosed that the main drive is defect, but I ran some of the built in hardware tests, it became obvious that the main drive is ok, the cache drive needs replacement.

This machine has a premium support contract, but HP support is unfortunately not living up to it.

The replacement part was promised to arrive today, tracking info shows tomorrow evening.

Support tech comes tomorrow during the day when the part is not available yet.

So my question is: how to disable the 16GB cache drive on this machine?

Main HDD can be hooked up on another machine to access files.

Thanks!

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

This article should give you enough information diagnose your issue.

Having a cache SSD device fail is extremely, extremely, extremely rare.  However, it's a good question to ask "would if".:smileywink:

Thanks for posting on the forum.

[Musepuckl11]

Thanks for your post,  I have seen amother post here with the same issue.

That article did not apply - Ctrl+I did not bring up any other dialogue.

We received the cache drive, the support technicial swapped it and was able to boot after a few attempts.

Still, it would be interesting to know how to disable the cache drive in case it fails and the machine does not boot.

Thanks!

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

The article that I posted for you refers to an Intel hardware caching method and would require that the SATA controller be set to RAID mode. The other method that HP uses is software. Removing the caching device (which I have tried BTW) will allow the PC to boot unless of course the hard drive has failed. 

BTW --- ctrl+i is a standard Intel ROM entry procedure that has worked for me on ALL PCs that I have used with Intel RAID functionality when the SATA mode is set to RAID.

Thanks for posting on the forum.

[Musepuckl11]

Well, this case is different.

Main hard drive ok, machine did not boot when cache drive removed or disabled via bios.

With a clone of the main drive the machine acted the same way.

After replacing cache drive, machine did not boot the fist or 2nd attempt - Technician could not explain why the machine booted 3rd attempt.

Scary. Will change to full SSD soon.

How do you disable cache drive software?

Thx

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

Go into Task Manager and look under services. Do a sort by description and you will find the service (ExpressCache). Right mouse click and select stop.  Reboot your PC and recheck the ExpressCache service it ensure that it has stopped.

 According to a HP ExpressCache document your PC is not authorized for Condusiv. hmmmmm

Thanks for posting on the forum.

[Musepuckl11]

What is Condusiv?

Machine came like this out of the box...

Thanks

[Big_Dave]

Hi,

If ctrl-i doesn't work then your PC is probably using software caching.

Thanks for posting on the forum.