Intellistation Z Pro 9228 - Hard disk rails?

[Lomax]

I recently became the happy owner of a 9228 Intellistation (1x 3GHz Xeon 5160, Quadro FX1500, no RAM, no drives) which is now zooming along nicely with a Samsung SSD and 16Gb RAM. I've got a problem though: as the machine came without drives it also came without any HDD rails, and while the SSD is so ridiculously light it can hang directly off the SATA connector without problem, I also want to put a 2TB 3 1/4 drive in. I haven't figured out any reasonable way to DIY a set of drive rails, nor have I been able to find any FRU number or any indication of the part in any diagrams or parts lists - not even a mention on the web. Today I spotted this HDD for sale on the Bay, which allegedly comes from an Intellistation 9228, and it has the rails/tray/caddy attached - it turns out they look nothing like the other IBM drive rails I've seen and I suspect they are model specific The slim sides certainly seem to be correct, all other IBM hdd rails I've seen are much thicker and the drive cage on the 9228 is much too narrow for them (about 11cm or 4 1/4").

To make a long story short: does anyone here know where I can buy a drive tray that fits the Intellistation 9228? If not, can anyone help me with the correct FRU number(s)? Any help much appreciated!

[Gewehr98]

IBM FRU 42C7423 or FRU 25R8864.

eBay has them for $4.50 + S&H:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-25R8864-Sim ... 3a78f930f1

May I ask how your Samsung SSD install went? I have an OCZ Vertex 2 that won't let me install Windows 7 64 Bit Ultimate due to BIOS incompatibility on my 9228 Z-Pro.

I still want to put Windows on a 250Gb or so SSD, and move my 1Tb Western Digital Caviar black to the data drive role for speed.

[Lomax]

IBM FRU 42C7423 or FRU 25R8864.

Ah, perfect, many thanks! I made my own rails in the end, which work perfectly, but it was fairly time consuming and I only made one set.

May I ask how your Samsung SSD install went? I have an OCZ Vertex 2 that won't let me install Windows 7 64 Bit Ultimate due to BIOS incompatibility on my 9228 Z-Pro.

I installed Win7 x64 and it went very smooth indeed. The only thing to bear in mind is to enable AHCI in the BIOS before you install Windows (you cannot enable it afterwards). Also leave some free unpartitioned space (minimum 7%) for the drive to use for maintenance (so called over provisioning). And once installed you want to perform a few tweaks, such as moving or turning off the swap file, turning off prefetch, SuperFetch, and Windows write-cache. Just Google "windows 7 ssd" and you'll find some good guides.

HTH!

[Gewehr98]

Thanks for the tips, Lomax!

I just installed a Corsair Force 3 256Gb SATA III SSD in my 9228. I know I'm limited to SATA II on that machine, but WOW, does that ever make for a responsive system!

I kept the 1Tb Western Digital Caviar Black HD as my data storage drive, and also left the pagefile resident on a 60Gb OCZ Vertex SSD to free up the Corsair Force 3's space and pagefile read/write operations.

Besides taking the pagefile off the main system SSD, I also killed indexing for all drives, confirmed TRIM was enabled, and turned off ReadyBoost on the 60Gb Vertex SSD's remaining free space.

I'll play with the prefetch settings next.