Internal HDD sizes for Asrock Vision HT 321b

[Jamie_AU]

On the Asrock website and in the manual, it says that the Asrock Vision HT 321b can house two 2.5" form-factor SATA drivers internally.

The 2.5 inch specification is vague, as 2.5" SATA drives come in a variety of thicknesses. For example, Western Digital has the "WD Black" series which ranges from 160Gb to 750Gb and they are 9.5 mm in height. There's also the WD Green which is available in sizes up to 2Tb, but it has a larger height of 15mm. Then there's the WD Blue which has a range of heights from 7 to 12.5 mm. These specs can all be seen at Internal Mobile Hard Drives Overview

So, what drive height does the Vision HT 321b have space for or support in terms of 2.5" internal drives?

Secondly, can one fully load up the system inside with 2 x 2.5" SATA drives PLUS an mSATA SSD card, thus making a total of 3 drives?

[parsec]

The size differences you mentioned should make no difference in mounting those 2.5" HDDs. There is a maximum thickness defined in the 2.5" drive form factor, and any size difference will only be smaller than that. The manual did not have any warnings about the height/thickness of the HDDs.

The manual was unclear about using two SATA drives plus the mSATA drive. The HM77 chipset supports up to six ports, so that is not the limitation, if one exists.

[Jamie_AU]

There is a maximum thickness defined in the 2.5" drive form factor, and any size difference will only be smaller than that. The manual did not have any warnings about the height/thickness of the HDDs.

The 2.5" form factor traditionally refers to drives suitable in size for laptop computers. And up until recently, you generally saw these drives no thicker than about 9.5mm which were capped at about 750 Gb in terms of capacity. This year, Westerm Digital have released these "WD Green" internal mobile hard drives with capacity of up to 2 Tb, but almost double the thickness, at 15 mm. The space in an ASRock mini-PC is not infinite, so there must be some limit to the thickness of the drive permitted. After all, WD could come out tomorrow with a 2.5 inch 4 Tb drive that's 30 mm thick, and you cant expect ASRock to have been able to foresee the future to ensure those sort of drives can be accommodated.

I guess I'd be interested in hearing from an ASRock Vision HT owner to see if there is space for a thicker drive inside the box.

[Jamie_AU]

The manual was unclear about using two SATA drives plus the mSATA drive. The HM77 chipset supports up to six ports, so that is not the limitation, if one exists.

The only reason I brought up the mSATA drive issue was just in case the installation of such a drive would impact upon the space that was available for the other 1 or 2 HDDs that the system could house.

[Jamie_AU]

Just got an email back from ASRock in regards to the drive height of a 2.5 inch form factor drive you can install in a Vision mini-PC. Took them 6 weeks to respond. :)

The official word is that you must use a 9.5mm high drive. So that means Western Digital's new "WD Green" mobile drives of between 1.5 and 2 TB capacity are incompatible. So if you're wanting to use a WD drive in there, you are limited in size to a 750 Gb WD Black or Blue drive.

I guess for a high capacity option, you could attach one or more of Western Digital's new portable (external, USB-powered) 2TB drives, but as well as having something sitting outside of the box, I wonder if the performance of such a USB 3.0 drive would match that of a SATA internal drive.