Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I've had the M3800 for a while now and more and more I've been experiencing ridiculous performance issues. All diagnostics and profiling point to the Hard drive performance as the culprit. Dell is sending a replacement but I'm wondering if the Hybrid drive is just that slow and if I should simply get an SSD for my open mSATA slot.

Thoughts?

 

You probably won't regret it.


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It's tough to give thoughts without any details on the nature and results of the "diagnostics and profiling" you performed or examples of what you consider ridiculous performance. But a true SSD is always going to outperform a hybrid hard drive. Whether it's worth the cost to upgrade is of course a personal decision, but for the average person's PC usage profile, there is no better performance-per-dollar upgrade than installing an SSD. For people whose workloads are heavily CPU, memory, and/or GPU-intensive, investing in those subsystems may be wiser, but for most people the performance bottleneck is always storage.

Fair warning, though: If you've never tried an SSD, it is an absolute paradigm shift, and once you use one, you will never be able to tolerate going back. In 2010 I bought an SSD (a Samsung PM800) for my Precision M6300 that I'd bought in 2007, and that upgrade singlehandedly extended that system's useful life by 3 years. Then I started my new job a year ago, and they gave me a brand new Latitude E6430 -- but it had a spinning disk. I couldn't stand using it, because despite having 50% more RAM and a much faster CPU, it still crawled compared to my SSD-equipped 7-year-old M6300. I ended up spending my own cash to buy a small SSD for my work system; that's how addictive they are.

To give you concrete data points, my M6300 originally had a 160GB 7200 RPM disk installed, and immediately prior to installing the SSD I clocked its Windows 7 boot time at 39 seconds. I then cloned that to the SSD I'd bought (as opposed to doing a clean install), and my boot time dropped to 13 seconds. And that was with that Samsung PM800 from 2010, which is pretty slow by today's SSD standards. My XPS 15 with the 512GB Samsung SM841 SSD that came with the system boots Windows 8.1 in 5 seconds flat. Restarts take a few extra seconds because they don't use Windows 8's Fast Boot feature.

 

1) What jphughan said.

2) I think the only real question is whether you're better off adding an SSD to the open mSATA slot, or replacing the hybrid drive with an SSD. There are advantages to either. (I did both; I bought it with the 256gb mSATA + 500gb Hybrid Drive, and immediately replaced the hybrid drive with a large SSD I already had. I've since upgraded the 256mb to a 1TB.)

3) When I recycled the hybrid drive into an older system, I found it noticably slower compared the regular 7200rpm laptop drive I was trying to replace with it. I was surprised, and went back to the original 320gb 7200rpm drive in that machine, so in the cheapest case just going up to a 7200rpm drive might prove to be an upgrade.

If you're comfortable reinstalling Windows, or shrinking the boot partition enough to move it to a smaller drive, getting a smaller mSATA drive (120-128gb) is very inexpensive and will make the machine feel a LOT quicker at a cost potentially under $100 or the local equivalent.

If you're not, or you don't want to separate data from your windows installation, or you have a lot of apps and games, it might be easier to just image over the hybrid drive to 500gb or 512gb SSD (or a 480gb if you can shrink the partition a little.) It's pricier (around $250 for the cheapest decent models, the 480gb Crucial M500 or 500gb Samsung Evo) but very easy/convenient.

There's a LOT of information out there on SSD models/speeds, and a lot of people have strong opinions, but I'm increasingly of the opinion that except for crazy benchmarkers pretty much an SSD is an SSD.

 

Why take out hdd and replace it with regular ssd if you have free msata port? You lose storage space for nothing. You can just buy msata ssd with the capacity you need that way you get ssd for os and some programs you use and keep games and on hdd. Since os and installed programs wont be using hdd everything on it will load faster.

Also with 10$ adapter msata ssd can become 2.5" drive, but you cant stripe down 2.5" to msata...

 

Three potential reasons, none of which will apply to everyone:
1) Any combination of an SSD + spinning disk still loses the drop safety and durability advantage of an SSD-only configuration, since you are risking data loss on the disk. Obviously pricier to get the same space in SSD, but if you use your laptop on the road a lot (I do) and can afford it for the space you need (I can), it's the way to go.

2) If you don't want to reinstall the OS/applications, it is for many people easier to image the drive over than reinstall. At least on the M3800, where the mSATA port is always drive #2, imaging from the SSD to the mSATA drive is going to require a bunch more fussing with the UEFI boot settings and BCD files than just imaging over to a comparable sized SSD. None of this is hard for people who've done it before and know what these things are (ditto reinstalling Windows) but for some people it's going to be easier not to scramble things further.

3) re: mSATA vs. 2.5", large mSATA drives are often pricier at the same capacity.

Laptop designs vary in how they mount drives, and some will easily accomodate an mSATA-to-2.5" adapter in their regular mountings and some won't easily (or potentially at all). For the M3800, with side screws and a fixed bracket, it's not going to be the easiest one to secure a an mSATA-to-2.5" into. Might work, but not the first tool I'd pick for the job.

 

This surprises me. I'm betting (though I haven't investigated) that hybrid drives skimp on the platter rotational speed, relying instead on the cache to pick up the performance slack. That would definitely explain the lower performance compared to your 320GB 7200RPM drive initially, but as you used the system and the drive figured out what data should be stored in the cache, I would've expected the hybrid drive to pull ahead in performance, at least during routine tasks like booting Windows and working with your most heavily used applications and data. How long did you keep the hybrid drive in use before switching back?

 

Early SSHDs were 7200 but I believe most are 5400rpm now.


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I don't know about most, but the one I received was 5400rpm per searching the Seagate page with specs for the model number back in January when I got it.

A couple of days of very light use (as this was in a spare machine), which I would have figured was enough, but may not have been.

 

I can't seem to find any carbon fiber skin wraps (preferably front panel+keyboard) for the Dell Precision M3800

reasons being - I don't want the paint rubbing off over time (palm rest) + Dell logo is hideous

Do textured skin wraps even exist for the precision line?

feedback is appreciated, thank you.

something like this: