Seven ways of adding a SATA drive.
In September 2019 I heard from Michal from Poland. Having seen the various other mods on this site he had set out to modify his t5740 by adding the second SATA connector, installing a couple of SATA drives for storage, and to run the system firmware from an SSD connected to the IDE port.
His first decision was to use a horizontal SATA socket rather than a vertical one as it gave him a little
more room in the main housing. The SATA connector he used he recovered from an old laptop.
Having gone down this route he had to cut away some of the metalwork so that the new socket was accessible
from the secure USB compartment.
Another view with the motherboard back in place.
For the operating system SSD he bought an IDE-to-mSATA adapter. However tests he ran showed he was only getting read/write speeds of 30MB/s which he felt would not deliver a particularly responsive system and also wasted the benefit of an SSD.
He decided the answer was to utilise the mPCIe connector on the board and fit a mPCIe SATA controller
which he sourced through AliExpress. Once it arrived he ran some more tests and found it to be much better
than the earlier IDE-based setup.
The SSD he was using had an mSATA interface so he turned to AliExpress to source a mSATA-to-SATA adapter.
So in the end he settled on:
The mSATA adapter plugged nicely into the onboard SATA socket which just left the problem of how to fit the two 2.5" drives within the case - something that turned out to require a bit of thought.
One of his drives was a slim-line one. He discovered that, with care and another attack on the standard
metalwork, he could fit it under the HP logo on the side panel with it protruding down into the body of
the t5740. The drive was mounted to the plastic cover using double-sided tape.
The second drive could fit inside the housing in the corner of the t5740 by the RAM, but various protruding mountings had to be removed, both for to make room for this drive and also to ease the internal cabling. Examples were the threaded inserts for the VESA mount, the plastic guide on the end of the PCI slot, and the odd plastic mounting pillar such as that for the IDE DOM.
Finally there was the issue of power for the drives. One was powered from one of the secure USB ports whilst the other was powered from the added SATA socket.
Here you can see the power take-off from the added socket which is connected to the cable headed for the
slim-line drive. The other drive is powered by the 5V line from one of the secure USB sockets.
In the middle the green square is the bottom of the mSATA adapter that's plugged into the normal SATA socket.
Back left you can see the free 'internal' drive which has been insulated so that it doesn't short out any of the internal electronics.
Finally a view of the slim-line drive mounted to the plastic side piece and the hole in the
metalwork into which it fits.
A section of the Windows Disk Manager display on the running system.
