Finally an SSD replacement for the M4500

If you didn't buy it with your laptop, the mSATA drives are now available on newegg (from Intel)

In 80gb
Newegg.com - Intel Soda Creek SSDMAEMC080G2C1 mSATA 80GB Mini PCIe (SATA) MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

and 40gb
Newegg.com - Intel Soda Creek SSDMAEMC040G2C1 mSATA 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

also toshiba just got into the mSATA game, but I haven't seen their stuff available yet

Oh yeah and these ones support trim (unlike the samsung one aka: the one that you buy with the laptop)

Anyone willing to get their feet wet?

EDIT: Also did alot of research into this stuff. mSATA is a particular interface, like SATA I, SATA II or PATA. The pinouts are different and it requires different firmware on the controller. So every other 50mm SSD doesn't work with the Precision line laptops. So right now the only manufacturer's producing mSATA disks are Samsung, Intel and Toshiba. And of these only Intel's are available via retail (could change though).

This is the new one supposedly has twice the write speed of the intel and samsung (200 vs 100mb/s) and a bit faster write speed.
http://www.renice-tech.com/product.asp?classid=119

 

I've got it installed on my M6500 and works great. 30sec boot time. Still installing apps at the mo.

One thing I'm not able to work out. Any HDD in the 1st port makes the SSD disappear. I have a 500GB in port 2 (I mean the physical port in the Dell) and no problems, but port 1 stops the Intel SSD from appearing in the Boot config & BIOS.

Can the 3 disks not live sid-by-side?

 

Havoctex made a post about this earlier; if you're going to have a SSD in the mini-SSD slot, the other 2 drives need to be in RAID. It's probably a limitation in the controller or BIOS; they only allow for 2 internal "drives" (for whatever reason). Putting the other 2 drives into RAID turns them into one "drive" as far as the controller is concerned, which solves the issue.

 

Thanks for the advice.

It was what I suspected but wanted to avoid having to clean everything out and start from scratch. Though since striping the disks as RAID 0 I'm amazed by the speed difference on the HDDs. Just under 200MBps for read and write, almost as good as the SSD.

So worth the trouble in the end!

 

The controller shouldn't have to be different, the pinouts aren't different, just size reduced (from what i've understood)... you still need an msata connector, but you only need a sata controller.

Toshiba has drives on the market already (I think msata is their IP actually). Unfortunately, the intel 310 only gets 200/70 r/w... far from the 250/180 that full drives will have.

Edit: the renice drive has pretty slow latency... 100microseconds, compared to the 310's 65.

 

Thats not true, Mod: Using a MiniPCIe SSD in Joojoo (60? for 32GB) : Hardware
you do mSATA has a different pinout, same controller though.