Seven ways of adding a SATA drive.
The photographs here come from Pascal in France.
Originally Pascal was running an HP t5700 as a small home server. He had added a Samsung 2.5" IDE drive to it and had installed Windows XP SP3. After a few years he felt the need for a performance boost and managed to find an inexpensive st5742 on eBay.....why is it the ones I see are always several hundred pounds?
His first step was to move the IDE drive across to the st5742:
"First I've tried with my 44 pin ribbon and my ide disk but it's seem there is some problems of CRC errors which make slow disk access (UDMA 1 or even PIO mode which is very slow under Windows...). I've tried with another ribbon but still errors :(
So I've bought a sata extender cable to use the sata port on the motherboard, and plugged a sata disk. I had to make some modification of the sata connector to fit the small box, it was a bit hard, but now it's ok :)
I installed Windows 7 on it which works very well."
Here are pictures showing what he did...
Here's an overview of the st5742 with the SATA drive.
One issue here is the SATA connector - by the nature of its design it sticks out too far from the board and prevents the thin client's cover from being fitted. Pascal has had to 'modify' it to reduce the height.
I guess HP expect you to have fitted the expansion module if you are using this socket.
The 'mods' to the plug involve cutting away enough of the black plastic so that the leads can
be bent over sufficiently close to the board so that the cover can be fitted. The red circle
shows a point where Pascal got over enthusiastic and cut into the cable. As a result he had to
dig out his soldering iron to repair the wires he'd cut through.
There is another socket for the RAM on the other side of the motherboard. Pascal moved the
RAM across to that one to get it clear of the hard disk and heat it might be producing.
The disk is fitted to the underneath of the metal cover. Pascal drilled a couple of extra
holes in order to be able to mount it.
The SATA cables fit neatly around the inside edge of the housing.
A view inside - with the cover nearly in place showing where the disk drive sits.