Installing a second hard drive in a HP ENVY 15

[David12228]

I have just bought an HP ENVY 15t-j100. I opted to have an SSD instead of the 1TB drive. I was told that the original drive could be installed as a secondary drive but foolishly decided not to do that. Believe it or not I was concerned about the added weight! Hey, I'd just lost a Viao Z550, it weighed in at 3.2 pounds, and that included an optical drive! I had never actually seen an HP Envy, ordered it from overseas just going on the spec. Now that I have it I can see that worrying about the extra weight of the drive is like being concerned with the extra weight of a GPS unit in a Chevy Suburban. The power brick alone weighs about as much as the Z550!

So now I would like to add a secondary drive. I came across a tutorial for doing this in an Envy 17, would the 15 be much the same? Thanks for any enlightenment.

[Huffer]

The Envy 15 has no slot for a second hard drive like the Envy 17. The extra 2 inches makes all the difference there, and if you think the 15 is heavy you would really be impressed with the heft of the 17. The only way to add a second drive is to remove the CD/DVD drive and use a drive adapter and I have never been a big fan of that arrangement. You may have a slot for a mSSD/mSATA drive but working with one of those as a storage drive is a big headache and will require reinstallation of the OS, probably. 

If this is "the Answer" please click "Accept as Solution" to help others find it. 

[David12228]

I didn't get the chance to check back in to this forum until now, but thanks for the information. The company I bought it from, Eluktronics, says that an mSSD "could" be installed. You say that using one of these mSSD drives for storage is problematical, can you explain what the problems are? Are they less reliable?

David

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

No the problem is not with the hardware...mSSDs are very fast and reliable. The problem is the design. The mSSD slot is supposed to be and is designed to be used only for a hard drive acceleration cache...usually 24 or 32 gigs. It allows the speed of an SSD to leverage the performance of the main regular hard drive. It is close to rocket science. It is technically possible to work around the way HP has set it up with limits in the BIOS and such but it is not really designed for that mSSD slot to be used to hold a storage sized drive to be used as an ordinary mounted volume or the main boot drive. Again, possible, but it takes a degree in computer engineering to accomplish.