Question Older PC/Thin client and reaction to newer large SATA m.2 SSD?

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

I have an HP T620 Thin Client that I'm going to use as a mini pc on my work desk. This question is for that, but really could be related to any older PC and a newer drive, I guess.

The internal "drive" on this pc is a m.2 sata one, currently with a 16GB ssd in there. I haven't been able to find anything about a maximum size, but these units were made back around 2014, I believe.

I'd like to put a larger drive in there, but I wasn't sure how the system would react to having a drive installed that was MANY times larger than what existed back when these were new.

For example, if I replaced the sata m.2 current 16GB drive with a 128 GB one, would the system even boot? Would it only see 16GB no matter how big the drive is?

I've run into issues with older operating systems and newer huge drives before, but I'm not sure how the BIOS of an older PC would react to newer, large drives. Thanks for any info!

 

[Tech Junky]

I swapped the drive my car uses for MMI to an msata for durability. The issue I ran into with trying to expand is it uses qnx for the file system and it requires some additional techniques to manipulate the structure and or the space.the physical drive was 60gb and I was thinking about bumping it to 128 but it was a pita to try to get it expanded to use all of the extra space. Besides that it needed an adapter to pata133 which limited the speed. I would say there's no harm in trying to upgrade the drive and clone the original to the new drive and make a backup image before trying to change the capacity.

 

[JWade]

i had one of those, i put in a 128gb drive in it and installed windows 7 with no issues

 

[thigobr]

They are not that old to not accept drives larger than 128GB... If you just clone the 16GB drive though without any partition size update the OS will still only see the same 16GB no matter the size of the new drive. So what you will need is to clone the drive and then resize the partition on the new drive to fill the whole disk.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

They are not that old to not accept drives larger than 128GB... If you just clone the 16GB drive though without any partition size update the OS will still only see the same 16GB no matter the size of the new drive. So what you will need is to clone the drive and then resize the partition on the new drive to fill the whole disk.

Ah, I don't need to clone anything off of the existing drive - it is empty. I just want to set up an old version of Windows one one partitition, then perhaps some version of Chrome OS or Linux on others.

 

[mindless1]

I've not really heard about this before, I mean anyone ever having a system that took SATA or newer SSD interface, that had an SSD of too high a capacity. I thought the lowest limit with legacy bios was 2.2TB for a windows boot partition? I could easily be wrong...

Anyway following what I stated above, seems like 128GB was a limit that bios capability exceeded about 20 years ago.

 

[GunsMadeAmericaFree]

All right, I'll give it a shot - I ordered a 128GB SATA m.2 ssd. That will be WAY more than I need, but it was cheap, and new.