How to upgrade your notebook to a SATA 2.5" SSD

[Bill-S737]

Hi Casiopeia,

I had a similar issue before mine would recognize anything. It has to do with the boot order. In the UEFI boot order, I had to move OS Boot manager to the top. Apparently, that allowed the BIOS to recognize the SDD as a bootable drive.

[Casiopeia]

So one cannot set AHCI/SATA from within BIOS? I tried to find it and no luck. Also, all I find in the Crucial SSD website are firmware updates, not drivers.

[Casiopeia]

Thanks Bill!!! Once I placed "OS Boot Manager" at the top of the boot sequence it did recognize the SSD!. I was sweating for a while thinking that the SSD was not compatible. Installing Windows right now! Thanks

[computaquark]

Correct AHCI is automated with no BIOS user settings, had me confused for a while.  Try a diagnostic tool and AHCI enabled show be shown.

[Ben42Fr]

Hello,

I am here because I try to upgrade the laptop of a friend, and I want to be sure that there will be no issue.

There are a lots of talk around ssd here, and I would like a clean answer.

I have a Pavillion dv6-1340sf here. I have the HP recovery disks.

I would like to change the HDD to a SSD.

Can I easily do a clean install with the new SSD inside with the HP disk ? No problem with the W7 OEM license ?

No problem with the installation ? SSD size can be lower than the HDD size ?

Which SSD do you recommand ?

Usually I try and walk through the potential issues, but as it is not for me, I would like to be completly sure.

Thanks a lot.

Benjamin

[Bill-S737]

Hi Computaquarq,

You suggested "Try a diagnostic tool and AHCI enabled show be shown." I'm not sure I follow...

What diagnostic tool would you suggest? (I'm willing...)

And what do you mean by "AHCI enabled show be shown"?

Thanks!

[erico]

@Bill-S737

Yours is a bit of a special case.  You have a hybrid hard disk and an SSD installed. Consider yourself fortunate to have figured out how to get the hybrid SSD and on top of that, an SSD to work together.  Some manufacturers of hybrid disks (I won't name a particular brand) claim that they work on all notebooks, but I have seen threads here in the forum that are testaments to the half truth of that. If the manufacturers would provide a BIOS to the owners of laptops that allowed their claim to be true, then it would be true.

If you had originally used an SSD and a SATA to USB cable (or a sub HD enclosure) and cloning software (perhaps Acorn) the migration would have gone smoothly.

Since you have used the enable ahci interface after windows installation method, perhaps you should try the folowing. Open the Device Manager and expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers section. If achi is enabled and working, you should see something like in the following image.

The following image is from my current HP product loan Omen 15 Gaming notebook, which HP has provided to help me respond to questions in the forum.

[computaquark]

AHCI used to be a BIOS setting.  After an SSD install it used to be necessary to enable AHCI in the BIOS.  Now HP do not have AHCI BIOS settings that the user needs to change as the process has become automated.  Here is a link to check for AHCI directly through windows even without running a diagnostic http://everydaylife.globalpost.com/check-ahci-mode-properly-enabled-21248.html

Sometimes it is necessary to edit the registry 

1. Exit all Windows-based programs.
2. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
3. If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
4. Locate and then click the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
5. In the right pane, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
6. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
7. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

Edit the registry if you feel confident.  Miss editing the registry could crash your computer so do it at your own risk and have a complete back up ready.

[erico]

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@Ben42Fr wrote:

Hello,

I am here because I try to upgrade the laptop of a friend, and I want to be sure that there will be no issue.

There are a lots of talk around ssd here, and I would like a clean answer.

I have a Pavillion dv6-1340sf here. I have the HP recovery disks.

I would like to change the HDD to a SSD.

Can I easily do a clean install with the new SSD inside with the HP disk ? Cloning is easier, but yes, you can do a clean install from OS installation media. No problem with the W7 OEM license ? No problem.

No problem with the installation ? SSD size can be lower than the HDD size ? To use the recovery media, the candidate SSD has to be 160 Gb or larger

Which SSD do you recommand ? Intel , Samsung EVO, Crucial. I have used all three brands and I do recommend them

Usually I try and walk through the potential issues, but as it is not for me, I would like to be completly sure.

Thanks a lot.

Benjamin

---

[Bill-S737]

@erico, @computaquark

Thanks much for your response! I'm now a happy camper, though via a different route. I'd already gone thru all the steps you outlined to get up & running to start with. I used a dongle to attach the SSD & Magicians cloning  s/w to do the intial load. It didn't work. Tried another cloing s/w to see if it'd work. No luck. Couldn't find anything in the BIOS that looked like SATA3. Finally tried the "OS Boot Manager", & that enabled notebook to recognize the drive.

Probaly, both cloning attempts were successful, but I just hadn't broken the bios code for SATA3 to enable notebook to recognize the SSD as a bootable device.

Once working, I couldn't understand why performance was only 15-20% better than before.

That's the point at which I seriously started trying to enable AHCI. I'd already found/edited AHCI registry entries. Still no luck. So I researched elsewhere in this forum thinking I surely wouldn't be the only one facing this... I wasn't... found another thread that recommended getting the latest driver for Intel's Rapid Storage Technology manager; did so, installed it, & suddenly that app no longer errored out when attempting to manage the SSD.

Performance is about the same, so I think all I did was fix a bug that prevented the mgmt s/w from opening. And I also now know that RST enables AHCI automatically, regardless of Magician's complaint. It also taught me how to read Magician's performance benchmark. I'm getting the performance I should expect.

What I didn't realize was what good performance the laptop shipped with! Here's a link to a Seagate benchmark for the Seagate Momentus hybrid drive against a comparable SSD. If I'd known to expect only a modest performance gain, I might've saved the money. 🙂

HP advanced one in my mind for their selection of these components over a year ago for this laptop.

All said, I'm a happy camper now.

Many thanks to you & all others who replied for your help.