CM690II Advance top bay

wildman

wildman

wildman

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I built a new rig in a CM690. When I did all the cabling I know I plugged in 2 red sata cables to the sata ports. SO I assume 1 was for the eSATA port on the front of the case and the other one is ofr the bay under the slide panel on the top. I looked at the connector for this port for the first titme today and I can;t make out for love nor money what the hell docks in there. I thought it would be like a standard sata port but it doesn't look like it ?

So what kind of drive can you fit into this ?
 
IIRC the top bay combines both power and SATA connectors there.
It will take any normal SATA hard drive I think, it's just that rather than the normal SATA power connector and Data connector being separate they are done together at the correct spacing :)
 
Werewolf said:
IIRC the top bay combines both power and SATA connectors there.
It will take any normal SATA hard drive I think, it's just that rather than the normal SATA power connector and Data connector being separate they are done together at the correct spacing :)
Click to expand...

I can confirm.
 
i just plugged a hd into the top bay, but how do i access it?

thanks

edit: ignore, just realised i just had to restart :p
 
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Tom, if you haven't done so already you may need to turn on ahci in the bios, at least for the ports that are connected to the removable drive bay and esata port :)

IIRC that should let you plug drives in and eject them (so they can be removed), without restarting the machine :)
 
Werewolf said:
Tom, if you haven't done so already you may need to turn on ahci in the bios, at least for the ports that are connected to the removable drive bay and esata port :)

IIRC that should let you plug drives in and eject them (so they can be removed), without restarting the machine :)
Click to expand...

My PC wouldn't boot when I tried this.
 
ch3333z said:
I had the same problem when trying to do this. After some googling, the only real solution is to reinstall windows with the new AHCI settings applied... Can confirm XP and Vista have issues with this. Not sure about 7.
Click to expand...

I was using Win7 and I was trying to install Win7 for the first time at the time.
 
thanks for the info.

one question though...

I am going to be putting an SSD into my system next week. SO I know I go into the BIOS and change SATA mode to AHCI. When I reconnect my F3 Spinpoint after I have got win7 on the SSD as the boot drive will the system still detect it now that I have chnaged the mode to AHCI ?
 
Windows should detect the drive fine :)
I'm not sure if you would need to reinstall windows if the boot drive changed from normal to AHCI, but IIRC most bios's should let you manually set the AHCI status on a per drive basis

I've got AHCI enabled on my (now ageing) machine, and the bios detects which drives (hard drives) are AHCI compliant and sets itself up for them, and which drives (optical) aren't and disables it for them.
From memory once I enable AHCI in the main bios page it unlocks an option for each of the SATA ports in turn letting me choose "auto", "AHCI" and "IDE", and auto seems to work fine :)
I'd imagine most machines are fairly similar, as most bios's seem to follow the same basic layout and options for the same features.
 
Yeh like Werewolf said it should work fine. Just sometimes windows throws a wobbly like in my case... but works fine now.
 
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