PC Hardware → Adding an SSD to a P6-2133W Desktop

Would it be possible to add an SSD in the future to this model desktop, P6-2133W from HP, Only one 3 1/2 inch bay, currently occuiped with the main hard drive right now

do have inaccessible 5 1/4 inch bay in there from the outside, suppose if i got one in the future, i could stick it in there

From what "little" I could find about the system on the HP website, I wouldn't waste the money on an SSD for this machine, the Sata interface appears to be only Sata II at 3Gbs. If there isn't another spare sata cable in the system or another sata connector on the MB that you can use, then you can't really add another disk drive anyway.

Has Serial ATA 3 i believe, but i'll double check that on HP's website

Motherboard specs for this P6-2133W Desktop System

»h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf ··· =5192567

Clearly shows 6x Serial ata 3.0 connectors

Yes, I see that item now. It must be that the internal HDD they supplied is only sata II. Anyway, I didn't see where it had an additional drive bay.
But you have the physical machine to look into and I don't.

Yeah not many additonal bays inside, and gonna invest in newer Serial ata 3 hard drive later on, most likely Seagate or Western Digital, inside right now Hitachi model, but i guess works ok for now.

might be one 5 1/4 inch bay only accessible inside, but i'll have to double check that in the future

You're reading it wrong. You have 6x SATA3.0Gbps ports, which is SATAII

Oh ok, oopsy, guess i did read it wrong

Whether a PC has 6 Gbps SATA ports should have little, if any bearing on a potential SSD upgrade. Heck, I've personally seen tremendous speed increases using newer SSDs on 1.5 Gbps ports (see this video I made with an Intel 320 in an old Pentium 4 machine). I have a Mushkin Chronos SSD (similar to an OCZ Agility 3) in my 6+ year old Dell laptop, with an ICH7-M southbridge providing a 1.5 Gbps port. It was a big improvement in speed on that machine, even though the SSD is nowhere close to being stressed.

It only really matters with high sequential throughput scenarios, or random IO with high queue depths. For the former, other storage would probably be the bottleneck. For the latter, you're unlikely to experience such workloads, unless you're using the PC as a highly-loaded server.

It doesn't say Gbps on their listing, so it could be either way. I'd lean towards them being 6 Gbps, as the Hudson-D3 FCH is capable of six 6 Gbps ports.

I would disagree. Normally it is listed as SATA3 or SATAIII for SATA 6.0Gbps ports. If it has a decimal, I would say it is denoting Gbps seeing as how SATAI was 1.5Gbps, requiring the decimal place.

Plus, there is normally an additional controller card onboard for SATAIII for any ports over 4. I don't see such listed.

I don't care how old the system is (within reason) , putting an SSD into any kind of machine is going to breathe new life into the system. Yeah, it may not be SATA 3 but you're still going to be take advantage of the fact that you don't have the latency of finding the data on a spinning disk.

Go ahead, install the SSD. The biggest bottlenecks that today's PCs have is the slow hard drives, SSDs solve that problem

Here is more info on the Hudson chipsets if this helps any, don't know if mine is D1 or D2 or D3 lol, will have to check into that sometime

»www.fudzilla.com/motherb ··· flavours

I would agree with that.

According to HP, it's the D3.

Normally, yes, although I have seen sites list it as such. Incorrect or not, it does happen. Heck, on HP's page for the PC in question, it lists the motherboard as having two RAM slots, then four slots farther down the page, and the picture clearly shows four. If they can't even get that right, I wouldn't put it past them to screw up the SATA port information.

Anywho, the chipset itself does support six 6 Gbps ports. If they wanted to do 3 Gbps, they would probably have saved some money and went with the D1 instead. My HTPC has the exact same chipset, so I'm familiar with its capabilities. AMD doesn't arbitrarily gimp its chipset/CPU feature list as much as Intel tends to do.

Just ran a software hardware tester, and that confirmed my hard drive is Serial ATA 6gbs, so I would assume it's running in 6.0gb mode as this is hard drive from the factory