D/Dock Bay and SATA HDD module?

I have a Dell Latitude D830 that I recently upgraded to a SSD as the main drive, the 320 GB internal SATA HDD drive got relegated to a mediabay caddy.

The module works beautifully in the D830's internal Mediabay slot, much better than the old PATA HDD module, since it is indeed recognized as a SATA device instead of a USB device - much faster and SMART is supported.

However, if I put that SATA module into the D/Dock's Mediabay slot, it is not recognized at boot time (not shown when you enter the one-time boot menu) and not found by any OS (Ubuntu 10.04, Windows 7, Windows XP). The BIOS shows the bay as occupied with a 137 GB hard drive!

My BIOS is A15, the D/Dock is A01. I tried to flash it to A04, but even though the flash utility confirms "success", the BIOS still recognizes the station as A01.

The D/Dock does work with an old PATA HDD module (80 GB).

This reeks of the infamous "137 GB barrier" that many BIOS faced a couple of years ago - can anyone confirm this? Also, has anbody got a SATA HDD module working in a D/Dock - and if so, how?

Any help or data points are highly appreciated.

 

The D/Dock, is that the one that has the PCI slot, and all the fancy jazz associated with it?

If so, I suspect what you're dealing with is that there's a ATA to USB controller inside the D/Dock unit, which converts from the ATA signals (on the D-port) to the USB interface that's on the docking port connector.

Of course, your D-port SATA bay contains a SATA to ATA converter.

So, its the combination of the two converters that is causing the problem.

 

Yes, that is the one.

That is possible, but in that case it would surprise me that the BIOS sees the drive at all (BIOS sees the drive with 137GB instead of 320GB).

It would still be nice to see some positive or negative acknowledgement from people who have a similar setup working or failed to get it working.

 

*** BUMP ***

Anybody who tried to get a SATA HDD to work in a D/Dock bay? What where your results?