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1 Rookie
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6745
August 20th, 2017 00:00
Precision T3620 SATA ports on board
Hi all,
So my second query is regarding the SATA ports on the board.
Currently I have a 250gb Samsung SSD and a HGST 1TB 7200rpm drive with no optical. The two drives are connected via SATA 3 and SATA 4 ports.
SATA 1 and SATA 2 ports are empty.
First question is, is this correct or should the drives be connected via SATA 1 and 2?
My aim is to add a third 512GB SSD essentially wanting:
256: OS boot drive + documents
512: Junk drive (downloads/temp etc)
1TB: Either remove it or keep it and hold backups of the above + drive image
With the 4th SATA port, most likely a future optical drive such as bluray writer.
So it's just making the config correct for the above - like the memory thread, it's purely knowing what the numbers indicate - ie: logic dictates you start at 1 and finish at 4 but hardware logic I'm sure differs :)
Thanks in advance
speedstep
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47K Posts
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August 21st, 2017 08:00
White is Sata 1 which the ORANGE Sata cable goes to the OPTICAL Drive. Blue has a Blue SATA Cable that goes to SATA 0 which is the boot drive. 29 is SATA 0 31 is SATA 3, 22 is sata 2 21 is White SATA 1 which is where the optical drive goes. The Bios is not a boot manager that allows you to install many OS and choose which one.
RoHe
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August 20th, 2017 19:00
SATA ports are numbered 0, 1, 2, 3, according to the T3620 manual:
downloads.dell.com/.../precision-t3620-workstation_owner's manual_en-us.pdf
The boot hard drive typically gets connected to SATA0 which is the blue SATA connector on the motherboard.
aj84
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August 21st, 2017 02:00
Thanks RoHe
I did see this but there was no reference to what order so although it's setup currently as Blue = Primary boot drive and the black directly under it (sata 3) as the secondary, should it in actual fact be Blue = primary and Sata 1 White for the secondary or does it not matter?
And a slight twist on things, I am now considering getting an M.2 NVME drive for booting instead - does the M.2 slot take precedence over Sata 0 in terms of order?
aj84
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August 21st, 2017 09:00
Perfect so it is setup as per how it shold be. Thanks for your help!
aj84
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August 21st, 2017 10:00
SpeedStep - can I confirm nvme boot is supported on this model? Just came across another thread that you responded to back in January to say that specific model was not supported so I thought I would ask
speedstep
9 Legend
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August 22nd, 2017 09:00
You may hear these drives referred to as M.2 drives, and while technically correct, it is a bit of a misnomer. All NVME drives utilize the M.2 form factor, but not all M.2 SSDs utilize NVME technology. M.2 is simply the physical form factor.
I am not Dell engineering and windows 7 does not support NVME or USB 3.1 without the Skylake Image from dell.
I will neither confirm nor deny any such functionality.
I do not own said system. It appears to me that this system does support PCI-E booting NVME but there are additional caveats aka SAMSUNG 960 may not work at all. I am not samsung support either.
Intel Rapid Storage version 14.5 is required to use PCIe based M.2 SSD drives that appear as "NVMe" disks.
The NVMe disk does not have a PCI hardware ID but is recognized by the iaStor driver.
Example: SCSI\DiskNVMe____SM951_NVMe_SAMSUBXW7
Intel Rapid Storage 14.5 is not in the Windows PE CAB files for Windows PE 3.1, 5.0, or 10 as of yet and must be downloaded from Intel directly from https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/55005/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-.
You will need to download and extract the F6 driver directly to a USB thumb drive, then boot to the Windows media and load the IRST drivers:
Download the F6 driver depending on your processor (x86 for 32-bit processors, or x64 for 64-bit processors).
Extract the contents of the file to your USB drive.
Boot to the Windows installation media, and at the HDD selection screen, select Load drivers.
Select the appropriate driver based on your BIOS settings to display the HDD.
Proceed with the Windows installation.