M4600/6600 : Need advice on HDD/SSD choice

I'm very tempted to put an mSATA SSD into my M4600. I was too cheap to buy it from Dell right away, and after-sales it's a whopping 300+ expense.

Could anybody confirm if the OCZ Nocti 120GB would work?
(additional bonus - are all cables and screws necessary for installation included with the Nocti?)
Thanks!

 

Thanks for your help !
Last question : can I order my M4600 with just the minicard 128Go, and then buy on the net a Crucial 512Go and simply put it in ?
Will it be recognized ?

 

NOTE: This is a cross post from the OCZ Technology support forum.

Bottom line: My advice to anyone who puts in an SSD and uses it as their main drive, ignore the calls to turn off journaling and back up your data regularly. This technology is still too new to be relied upon in critical situations.

Just wanted to let the posters and OCZ know that 2.13 is unstable with A05 BIOS on a Dell Precision M4600 running Slackware64 13.37. I've since downgraded to 2.11 and A04 and everything is solid. All voltages / clocks are stock. The following are the particulars of my installation:

Code:

[B]rc.local:[/B]
echo 1500 > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs
echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
hdparm -W1 /dev/sda
hdparm -B255 /dev/sda

[B]/etc/fstab:[/B]
/dev/sda1        swap             swap        defaults                 0   0
/dev/sda2        /                ext4        noatime,defaults         1   1
/dev/sda3        /usr/local       ext4        noatime,defaults         1   2
/dev/sda4        /home            ext4        noatime,defaults         1   2

[B]mount:[/B]
/dev/root on / type ext4 (rw,noatime,commit=600)
/dev/sda3 on /usr/local type ext4 (rw,noatime,commit=600)
/dev/sda4 on /home type ext4 (rw,noatime,commit=600)

fstrim is executed by cron on a daily basis

Here are the firmware / BIOS combinations and the effects observed:

2.11 / A04 - stable, suspend and hibernate function normally (so far)
2.11 / A05 - stable, suspend and hibernate randomly fail (entering and exiting)
2.13 / A04 - stable, suspend and hibernate randomly fail (entering and exiting)
2.13 / A05 - unstable, OS reports input/output errors, all partitions on /dev/sda remounted read-only, forces hard reboot (happens at random intervals)

Specs for the setup:

Core i7-2820QM
16 GB Crucial DDR3 1333 MHz
240 GB OCZ Vertex 3 SSD
Quadro 2000M 2 GB
15" IPS display

 

thanks for the crosspost!

doesn't sound too good then for the OCZ Nocti so far then.... maybe a software update helps.

 

As per OCZ official staff response from the ocz forum, this ocz nocti 120 drive seems a scam!

That response means that the marketing figures of 280/260 MB/s are obtained only with compressible data?

 

I'm not that much surprised by the poor performance of the Nocti - a reader here posted his unobxing and some benchmarks and performance was way behind claimed speed -> http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...cz-nocti-msata-120gb-unboxing-benchmarks.html

So far, only the +50% capacity speaks for the Nocti compared the the Intel310 - unless Intel has some higher-capacity SSDs up their sleeve....

 

Hello !

I finally ordered my M4600 and am currently waiting for the delivery.
I chose the configuration with 256G SSD as primary drive.
I plan to add a 2nd SSD (512G Crucial) in the optical bay : can I just change and plug it ? is there any BIOS changes to make ?

Thanks !

 

mSATA Solid State Drives | MyDigitalSSD | My Digital Discount

The drives they are selling are seen in the following sizes: 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. They have some there that aren't entirely out of the world expensive, under the compatibility chart it said it was designed for both the M4500 and M4600, as well as the M6400 and M6500, however as to why the current 17" model, M6600 wasn't listed is beyond me. Perhaps a typo? Or does it just not support it. I've been looking really hard at this line of laptop and odds are it will most likely be the next laptop I purchase, so I'm excited to see the versatile performance it provides.

Also, if you are willing to wait, I think the Samsung 80gb mSATA Cards should be available soon, I'm not sure if they are out already, but if you think that 128gb is too much then I would wait for that, at least for economic reasons. But other options include the Intel 310 Series which is also served in both 40GB and 80GB but a tad bit on the expensive side as it is $100 and $190, respectively. Perhaps the Samsung mSATA will be a bit more evenly priced? But the 128gb mSATA up there, would probably give you the best price per gigabyte.