Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

I would like to know if hardware caliration is possible in this machine. If possible, with which tool and software, (i come from desktop era,eizo,i1 2, color navigator)
Otherwise, is its own software enough for accurate color?
Thank you in advance!

 

I've reconfigured my computer again, went back to 2x 750GB 7200rpm HDD RAID-1 + acceleration with the Crucial M4 mSATA 256GB (using the max. 64GB cache)

I've done a new benchmark, and these are my new/current settings:

"Intel Raid 1 Volume SCSI Disk Device" > Policies:
Write caching: Enabled; (checked)
Write-cache buffer flushing: Disabled; (checked) - (Previously Enabled, unchecked)

"Intel Rapid Storage Technology" > Manage > "Manage Array":
Disk data cache: Enabled; (Previously Disabled)

"Intel Rapid Storage Technology" > Manage > "Manage Volume":
Write-back caching: Disabled; (I tried looking for a way to enable this, but without luck)

"Intel Rapid Storage Technology" > Accelerate > "Acceleration Configuration":
Acceleration mode: Maximized; (Previously Enhanced)

Code:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2012 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :   243.261 MB/s
          Sequential Write :   208.610 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :   220.018 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :   218.126 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :    18.945 MB/s [  4625.4 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :    44.169 MB/s [ 10783.5 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :   174.869 MB/s [ 42692.7 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :   193.599 MB/s [ 47265.4 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [C: 75.3% (525.6/697.9 GB)] (x5)
  Date : 2012/12/17 10:29:48
    OS : Windows 7 Professional SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

Despite this improvement, the Windows Experience Index remains unchanged at a rating of 5.9

 

I've also reconfigured my system - 256GB mSATA and 750GB single HDD. 256GB is more than enough for my fast storage needs and I've changed things around to make more effective use of the fast storage. So now my setup is....

256GB mSATA SDD
==========
64GB OS and Programs. I said before that having the OS on the SSD was wasting space needlessly, but as I have space to spare there are benefits to this approach well worth having.
64GB ISRT Cache for HDD
109 GB for fast response data needs, which for me means documents and photos I am currently working with.

750GB HDD
=========
Music, video, archived raw photos, reference material and software downloads.


As an added bonus, and a further reason to suffer the pain of a reconfiguration, the HDD is now rarely accessed and I have it spin down after just five minutes. This renders the machine completely silent in operation for most of the time. The HDD is actually noisier whilst spinning than any other laptop drive I remember over the last 14 years as a laptop user and a distinct irritation when ambient sounds are otherwise low. It's wonderful to have that racket banished for 99% of the working day. My primary hard disk scores 7.8 in the Windows 8 WEI. Lowest score is for GFX at 7.2. Processor and RAM both get 7.9

 

Interesting, how did you get the OS installed on the mSATA SSD? I have tried numerous times, but at every attempt, the Blue-Screen shows up.

 

I wiped the mSATA drive completely using Diskpart and Clean. Then with UEFI boot I installed Win 8 from scratch, letting the OS installation configure the mSATA as a GPT drive.

I don't remember whether I specified a 64GB OS partition at the time of the install or if I gave it the full 256GB to begin with and then resized. I have a feeling that I set up a 64GB partition within the installation process and left the remainder of the drive unformatted.

Once I had the OS up and running I found that despite installing ISRT drivers I was unable to configure the cache partition. The option to set an acceleration cache was simply not displayed. I still had my original OS install sitting on the HDD so I booted from the HDD and ran IRST from there to set the acceleration cache on the mSATA. That seemed to work fine, so I disabled acceleration and left the cache partition intact. Then I rebooted from the mSATA once more and this time when I went to configure IRST the Accelerate tab was displayed and I was able to enable acceleration with the new cache partition.

Here's how my disk configuration looks at the moment. The 64GB reserved for IRST cache is invisible to the OS so the 256GB SSD looks a little short on storage.

 

What drive letter does the mSATA have when you run the OS from it?
I take it you managed to get the boot-sector on the mSATA instead of the HDD, and so have it run as C:\ ?

 

Windows (since Vista) will always use C:\ for the system drive --- if it doesn't, the partition/boot configuration is somehow messed up. In a multi-boot situation this means that your drive letters will be shuffled around depending which you boot from.

A UEFI installation doesn't do any boot sector stuff so in a way it is easier to manage than a traditional legacy BIOS installation, once you learn how to deal with it. With UEFI, a special system partition is created that contains the boot files (you can see these in tdodd's picture, the "EFI system partition"). You can actually have multiple bootloaders installed on this partition, so for example having a Windows and Linux installation on the same drive doesn't require them to fight over which one gets to be installed as the primary boot loader.

In any case, to make sure that the boot gets set up right, I recommend disabling or removing all drives except your target drive during the first part of the Windows install process. This will ensure that Windows puts all of the boot stuff on the same drive as the OS.

 

Have a look at the screen print I added. The mSATA is booting as C:. I have removed the drive letter for the OS partition on the HDD when booted from the mSATA, to avoid confusion.

Equally, if I boot from the HDD the OS partition is also C:, just as it was previously, and I have the mSATA OS partition unlabeled. In other words, whichever partition/disk I boot from my drive letter assignments are identical and the system appears to be configured much the same either way - with OS, DATA and MEDIA partitions labeled C:, D:, E: in either case.

Now, don't ask me about boot sectors and the like. That's too techy for me. Fortunately it all just seems to work. The small confusion in the BIOS is that I have two identically named boot options and it is there where I make the boot choice, not through some Windows boot manager interface.

 

Aaron, you've just reminded me of another step in my "success". Having Cleaned the mSATA drive whilst booted from the HDD I did then ejected the HDD when installing Win 8 onto the mSATA. That way there was absolutely no risk of confusion during the installation process. Once installation was complete and I reinserted the HDD that's where two boot device options appeared in the BIOS. It's as though the two drives are independent bootable devices. I think that is why there are no drive letter conflicts or shuffling going on and no boot selection option under the management of Windows. The BIOS stage is choosing what to boot.

 

That's why you have two EFI system partitions instead of one. If you had both drives present, Windows should have noticed the previous installation, used the existing bootloader and just added a second option.

If you'd like to consolidate so that you can use the Windows boot manager instead of the BIOS to choose the OS, I think you should be able to use EasyBCD to add additional options to the Windows bootloader. (You'll still have two options for the Windows bootloader unless you delete one of the EFI partitions, which Windows doesn't make it easy to do.)

Or just take the "if it ain't broke don't fix it" approach.