HP ENVY 15 j103-np mSATA slot

[DiogoMartinho]

Hello!

I have a j103-np and I noticed it had an open slot close to the wi-fi mPCIE board.

I've read another thread here where the user would want to upgrade his laptop having a bootable drive on that slot. That is not my case, I just want a storage capacity upgrade since this laptop already comes with a 512GB SSD. I was looking at a Kingston SUV500MS/240G, the mSATA version of course.Bottom of the laptop

I read that that slot was designed for a 24/32GB mSATA to fastten up the boot time from an HDD. Can I use it to place the SSD I mentioned above? For extra storage, I do not intend to use it a bootable drive!

Thank you in advance!

Diogo Martinho

[REO51ST]

Welcome to the HP Support Community @DiogoMartinho

Support for 24 GB mSATA SSD (not available on computer models equipped with 16834 MB or 12288 MB system memory or with a 256 GB or 512 GB SSD)

Your manual here:

http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c03943414

Look at page 5

HP ENVY 15-j103np Notebook PC Product Specifications

https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/hp-envy-15-j100-notebook-pc-series/5401187/model/7264953/docume...

REO

[DiogoMartinho]

Thanks for your answer @REO51ST!

As I understood, I can't put it an mSSD with 240GB there to expand the current default 512GB SSD?

[REO51ST · Accepted solution]

@DiogoMartinho

As you said: The slot was designed for a 24/32GB mSATA

I have heard of some being able to use 64GB.

REO

[DiogoMartinho]

So the only viable way of upgrading this laptop storage is increasing the bottable SSD capacity? That slot is useless if the main storage is already an SSD... Expanding storage by 32 or even 64GB is almost nothing these days...

[REO51ST]

@DiogoMartinho

You are correct again.

Only one option for upgrade is the SSD.

And it does make the slot useless because the SSD does not need the mSATA.

The mSATA is designed for a mechanical HDD.

REO

[DiogoMartinho]

Well, it could've been designed for a secondary storage expansion, since it is a high performance laptop, and there was no other similar laptop with a bigger primary disk than the 512 at the time I bought this.

I do still think the mSATA slot is useless if the laptop comes with an SSD since it can't be used to upgrade the current storage. I'll try to use the said SSD in here, because it makes no sense not allowing to connect a 240GB mSATA SSD or some other. And if it corrupts my stuff, I'll make sure not to get something from HP ever again though.

Anyway, thank you very much for the help!

Diogo Martinho

[Huffer]

Just for the record yes you can put a 240 gig or larger mSATA mSSD in that slot and use it just for extra storage. It cannot be a bootable drive but it will show up in disk management and can be formatted and made into a lettered drive. And yes its useless as an acceleration cache as you cannot accelerate an SSD under the technology used when that laptop was manufactured. This is kind of a unique request as no one was using these for storage but I have owned a couple of these models and experimented a bit and can tell you a disk in that slot will be available to be initialized and formatted to use for simple storage. 

[REO51ST]

Thanks @Huffer

I would not have guessed you could install one that large.

REO

[Huffer]

Its a weird one but still a SATA bus and there is no practical hardware constraint on the capacity of the disk you can use other than the limits of what is available in the market.