hw upgrade Dell Precision M90, M6500

I own a Dell M90 with a fairly limited 100GB HDD and a Dell M6500 with a 256GB PM800 SSD and an additional 750GB HDD.

1) first of all, the write speed of the M6500's PM800 SSD is amazingly low (~30MB/s seq). It uses firmware VBM24, and I strongly believe updating the firmware to VBM25 will solve that?

2) The firmware update to VBM25 will erase the SSD, so I need to do an image of it. I thought, when doing an image backup/restore, I may also exchange the 256GB SSD with a 512GB SSD. The M6500 uses SATAII (300MB/s), so what is the best SSD to fit into the M6500? The PM830/840 seem to be overspecced?

3) By replacing the M6500's PM800, I could in addition replace the 100GB HDD in my M90 with the PM800? I'm running Windows 7 x64 on the M90, so that should work. Can I easily replace the inbuild 100GB HDD with the PM800 hardware wise? I had not replaced any Laptop's harddrive yet...

Thank you!
Tab

 

1) Low random write is normal for PM800. The random writes on these early Sammys were never that high.

2) PM830/840 are fine choices. If you can find 830s they are typically a pretty good value for the higher capacities too.

3) Yes.

 

Thank you!

The 30MB/s is seq write speed.
rnd is way lower.

However, I'll update the firmware and see if it gets better...

 

Just a dumb question:

I checked the BIOS of the M90 to switch it to AHCI for the SSD.

I could not find anything to switch mode, neither raid, IDE, nor ahci...

What am I supposed to do, to install the ssd and get the optimum result with the m90?

 

The M90 BIOS does not support AHCI. Obviously it doesn't support RAID either as there is only one HDD bay.

 

So can I install the SSD nevertheless?
What will be the Impact then on the SSD?

 

Just install it and forget it. For all practical purposes there will be negligible to no difference.

 

Youre of great help commander, thanks