mSATA for HP Pavilion dv6t-7000 Quad Edition

Hi,

My question is actually quite simple. I don't want to do anything fancy like putting my OS on a mSATA or do I want to replace my main HDD with a SSD.

Simply this is an 8 yr old laptop and I just found out it has a mSATA port that isn't being used. I simply want to use it and it has been a pain so far. I don't know much about mSATA or SSD, so I am hoping some one can help me out?

The Pavilion DV6t-7000 manual said replace with "HP 682099-001" which is a 32GB mSATA III 6GB/s . However, that's all it said and gave me no other information. This part number is obsolete and discontinued, so what could I replace it with? I mean, how do I know which one is compatible? Or are they all suppose to work?

1) I bought a used "HP 695867-001" from eBay. It is 32GB mSATA III 6GB/s 3.3V and 1A. However, my laptop won't even detect it in the bios. So I returned it. (Apparently his one is for the Envy Dv6t-7000)

2) I did some more research and found Samsung "HP 680404-001" have labels that said replace with "HP 682099-001" so assumed these 2 then are compatible. It is 32GB mSATA III 6GB/s 3.3V and 1.5A.

So is the amperage which determines compatibility?

Anyways, I bought a used "HP 680404-001" on eBay and though the bios detected it but it said SMART was disabled, the drive only said 1GB unallocated, I couldn't partition it at all. So is it incompatible? Or did I simply bought a bad one?

Please help me out, I'm out of ideas. I'm going to return this one as well. But I'm wondering if I should bother trying another one. I read in this forum some people replaced the mSATA on this same laptop with "120GB OCZ Nocti mSATA drive" and "Mushkin Direct Atlas Deluxe 120GB mSATA SATA III Solid State Drive MKNSSDAT120GB-DX"

Now WHY would those work? The MKNSSDAT120GB-DX is even more puzzling b/c I found 3 different versions using 0.5A 0.8A and 1.1A. WHAT?! How can the same part number have 3 different amperage rating!?!!?

Thanks for all your help!

 

Hi,

For anyone in the future who ran into this. Question was answered in the more general forum on "msata upgrade."

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/msata-upgrade-question.834019/

The bottom line is?

1) HP making things more complicated than it is. It is a mSATA port and will work practically with any mSATA III 6gb/s transfer. It is really easy to use this as a 2nd drive instead of Intel's accelerated cache. On my system, by default it is not turned on as a cache. However, if your system has it on cache, just run Intel Rapid Storage (search in the menu bar) and turn off acceleration.

2) DO NOT BUY USED ones from eBay! This is where it screwed me up. Two of the ones I bought first were bad and I thought it was a "compatibility" issue. I finally bought a new one for testing, a generic China brand for $17, but new and it works. (Dogfish Tech - 32GB, 1A)

After the test, I ran the one that I wanted, Samsung 128GB open box (means it is new but sold without box), finally it worked and this one ran at 0.65A).

So a couple of notes:
1) A Lite-On 32GB, 1A (used) - BIOS didn't even detect it. Either it is a bad one or it is incompatible.

2) Samsung 32GB 1.5A (used) - Corrupted firmware, sold me an ewaste

3) Dogfish 32GB, 1A (new) - Worked like a charm. Generic brand but nice.

4) Samsung 128GB, 0.65A (open box) - Worked like a charm.

----

A) Size can probably go bigger, but I only needed a 128GB. I would think 512GB would definitely work, but anything larger might depend on BIOS update.

B) The lower the amperage the better, because it draws less power and generate less heat. The 0.65A is so nice, it doesn't even heat up.

C) I should note that both mSATA I bought that worked, they were formatted MBA, NTFS, Primary partition. The Dogfish was completely new, came unallocated and I had to format this myself (via adapter). Not sure what would happen if you inserted this into the mSATA port without formatting. I would guess it simply treat it as an unformatted drive and let's you format it.

D) mSATA-USB 3.0 adapter is not as fast as the actual mSATA port, despite their claim it is 6gb/s. USB 3.0 is at most 5gb/s, however I did the crystalmark benchmark test and the mSATA port is approx 2x faster than the USB 3.0 port in direct read and that itself was about 2x faster than my 7200 rpm HDD. However, in writing and random read, the mSATA port is almost 10-20x faster than the USB 3.0.

Good luck!

 

I had one of these notebooks years ago. I ran it with a 128GB Mushkin mSATA drive and had the OS on it as if it was a regular SATA port. The catch was the Windows bootloader had to be on the other system drive (the 1TB HDD in my case). I think Windows setup took care of this as long as both drives were completely blank (ie diskpart clean'ed) when doing the install but I really don't remember much anymore..... I have a feeling there's a post of mine on here somewhere detailing it.

It certainly is a mystery as to why that mSATA port had to be special and not just function as a full SATA port.