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Why in the left drive bay?

Kristian221
Level 7
Everywhere I look it says to place the boot drive in the left drive bay (from when you are looking at the back of it), why is that? Is that faster? According to windows, that is actually bay 1 while the empty slot is bay 0.
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3 REPLIES 3

hmscott
Level 12
Kristian221 wrote:
Everywhere I look it says to place the boot drive in the left drive bay (from when you are looking at the back of it), why is that? Is that faster? According to windows, that is actually bay 1 while the empty slot is bay 0.


Kristian221, nice sleuthing 🙂

The misconception is that it matters which position you put the drive in. It is relative to how it was originally configured / shipped, and can be changed.

When I describe how to swap the HD for an SSD, I say to pull out the HDD boot drive, and replace it with the new SSD. So depending on how Asus installed the original boot HD, it could be either Bay 0 or 1, Left/Middle Bay or Right/Edge Bay

The main boot drive used to be put mostly in the Middle/Left Bay, or Bay 1, but Asus sometimes ships the G750 with the boot drive in the outside edge bay, or Edge/Right Bay 0.

To confuse things, the JH/JZ/(JS) has a daughter card to hold the M.2 NGFF SATA SSD's for the RAID0 in the Middle/Left Bay, the port numbers are (as I recall) 2 and 4, while the "2nd Bay" or Edge/Right Bay is actually electrically Bay/Port 0.

The BIOS will find the bootable drive whichever Bay it is in, but it is easiest to keep the established order in place by keeping the boot bay the same across HDD / SSD upgrades.

What is important, is that in some of the (Best Buy?, Other??) models, only one of the Bay's is SATA III, while the other is SATA II - you can use a program like HWinfo64, AIDA Engineer, or others to determine the interface capability.

Typically the SATA III bay is the Middle/Left bay as Bay 1, so if your boot drive is in the Edge/Right Bay 0, and you establish that Bay 1 in your particular model is SATA III, and Bay 0 is SATA II, you may get some performance improvement by migrating the drive from Bay 0 to Bay 1, from SATA II to SATA III, or the reverse - depending on your model specifics.

You pull the 2nd non-boot drive and leave it out, move the boot drive into Bay 0 and boot on it. Then after the BIOS reconfigures and you test if there really is an improvement you can put the 2nd drive back in the G750.

My JH has SATA III for both SSD ports and the 2nd Bay, Edge/Right Bay.

I hope that cleared things up 😉

Kristian221
Level 7
Thank you very much sir! So I guess it does not matter which bay I place them in since I am doing a fresh install of Windows.

Kristian221 wrote:
Thank you very much sir! So I guess it does not matter which bay I place them in since I am doing a fresh install of Windows.


Kristian221, right, in the end you really need to pull both drives anyway, as the Asus Backtracker recovery flash drive will blow away all the partitions of the internal drives it finds, so you can put the SSD in either Bay. As I said, it is good to know before hand which Bay(s) are SATA III / II so you can put the boot drive in a SATA III Bay.

Please come back and let us know how your G750 is configured, and how it goes for the upgrade. 🙂