Support for mSata

[dfbbc]

Hallo, can i  upgrade my laptop with a msata ssd 128GB as boot device?

[Huffer]

Only if you have no other disk in there. If you are thinking an mSATA is going to be faster than a SATA 2.5 inch SSD it is not. Your best option is to use a 2.5 inch SATA SSD. The mSATA slot is designed for a small mSATA disk that acts as an "accelerator" for a main 2.5 inch mechanical hard drive. Uses Intel Rapid Storage app. It was kind of an evolutionary dead end although was a precurser to the current Optane thing, but Optane uses NVME tecnology and this uses SATA. 

[dfbbc]

Hi, thanks for your reply, the reason I m asking is I would like to build a Ssd+hdd system as described in the following article 

https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/install-msata-ssd-tutorial

I don’t want to replace my 1 tb hdd. I just want to know if my laptop support a 120GB msata ssd as booting device.

[David_J_W]

Yours is an older system with an mSATA slot, as explained in the Maintenance and Service Guide. It appears that this slot might be unavailable if a second RAM module is fitted, however.

As @Huffer says, mSATA is an evolutionary dead end. Rather than paying a lot for a mSATA SSD that is likely to be slow by the standards of modern SSDs, you may well be better off replacing the existing hard disk with a current model 2.5 inch SATA SSD. You appear to have dismissed this option, but it is worth thinking about nevertheless.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

That a 5 year old article from laptopmag (one of my favorite publications) and I perfectly well understood what you wanted to do, and I was heading you off and explaining it ain't gonna work. The implementation by HP of mSATA acceleration limits what you can do with the mSATA disk. As I said, if you have a 2.5 inch disk in there, the mSATA will not appear in the BIOS boot order meaning you cannot use the mSATA as the Windows disk. So no dual disk as you can do with more modern units. Hard to believe we are looking back on 5 or 6 years ago as olden times but that's the situation.