M6400 Upgrade to SSD?

I have a Dell Precision M6400 with two 7200 RPM hard drives. It is setup for RAID 0. I am wondering what I need to do to upgrade to two solid state drives.

Just trying to educate my self about what it would take.

Do I need to just buy the drives, plug them in, reformat and install? Or do I need a new controller too? Anyone know of any guides on the general upgrade process from these older 7200 RPM to Solid State?

I got my laptop one year ago exactly, so I suppose it isn't that old.

 

Provided you get 2.5" size with SATA interface (the most common SSD size) they will plug in and work. You don't need any new controller - the Intel chipset in your M6400 supports SATA-300.

If you had a single HDD then you could clone the old HDD onto the SSD, which avoids the need to reinstall everything. However, I don't know how to clone a RAID array.

John

 

You can clone the RAID array in exactly the same way as a single drive: The controller BIOS presents the array as a standard single drive to the system (or several drives, if so configured, see below), so any of the standard disk imaging tools (Acronis, Paragon, etc.) work just fine. I use that capability all the time.

There is one caveat: If you use a more complex RAID configuration (I use the controller's Matrix-RAID capabilities to set up two RAID arrays on my two disks, one RAID0 for system files, and one RAID1 array for user data) then there may be some quirks. However, the only effect of these quirks that I have found so far is that booting from anything other than the RAID array or the DVD drive can cause strange problems, and should be avoided. So if you try to boot from a USB stick, you may run into problems. Otherwise even a system such as mine can be imaged with no issues.

P.S.: I'd love to upgrade to SSDs myself, but putting two 500GB SSDs in there is somewhat out of reach, pricewise, at this point...

 

not a good idea,
from what i've heard, windows makes some changes during install if it detects you are installing onto a SSD drive,so that it doesn't wear the flash memory out!

if you image across from a standard hard drive, you will probably not be getting the best performance from your new (expensive) SSD

 

Hmm, that's a good point. I do know that on SSDs, Windows switches off the defragmenter, but I'm sure there will be other tweaks as well. The question is, is there some dosumentation somewhere that would detail those tweaks?

 

I have every intention of reinstalling, so that makes this fairly easy from a discussion point of view.

I just wasn't sure if I needed to buy anything other than the drives!

 

I believe SSDs are the feature, unfortunately SLC is still at low capacities. But that is the way to go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIChSTJK1IU

 

The most essential part of this story can be found on the official Windows 7 development blog: "Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives" on "Engineering Windows 7".

Windows 7 runs some tests on the drives to properly identify wether they are good SSDs or not:

Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx


The changes applied by Windows 7 for good SSDs are as follows:

• Scheduled defragmentation will be disabled for the SSD
  This is ALWAYS a good thing on SSDs, no matter if it's a good or bad one, as due to the nature of SSDs, the operating system won't actually have a clue where the files /really/ are on the drive. To disable scheduled defragmentation for your SSD, open "Computer", right-click your SSD, click "Properties", select the "Tools" tab, click "Defragment now", click "Configure Schedule" (or similar) and uncheck "Enable scheduled defragmentation" (or similar).
  
• ReadyBoost will be disabled
  This is useful for good SSDs, as ReadyBoost (not to be confused with "Superfetch") was made to leverage the negative effect on HDD performance of certain disk access patterns especially common when starting programs.
  To disable ReadyBoost on Vista and Windows 7, simply do not use any external drives as ReadyBoost drives.
  Additional information: to disable the ReadyBoost service on Vista (this service is not available on Windows 7, you would have to disable the "Superfetch" service instead), type "cmd" into the start menu, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and enter the following (paste via right-click -> paste):
  
  Code:

  sc config EMDMgmt start= disabled

  Additional information: to enable the ReadyBoost service on Vista (this is the default) (this service is not available on Windows 7), type "cmd" into the start menu, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and enter the following (paste via right-click -> paste):
  
  Code:

  sc config EMDMgmt start= auto

• Superfetch will be disabled
  Wether or not disabling Superfetch will help your performance is something you'll have to find out for you particular drive yourself /over an extended period of time/. It MIGHT help to increase performance even with some better SSDs. Superfetch analyzes your usage pattern, so it might take some time (up to some weeks) for it to result in performance benefits, keep this in mind when you're thinking about what it might be like if you disabled/enabled it.
  To disable Superfetch on Vista and Windows 7, type "cmd" into the start menu, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and enter the following (paste via right-click -> paste):
  
  Code:

  sc config SysMain start= disabled

  To enable Superfetch on Vista and Windows 7 (this is the default for Windows 7 unless it's running from a good SSD and Vista), type "cmd" into the start menu, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and enter the following (paste via right-click -> paste):
  
  Code:

  sc config SysMain start= auto

• Boot and application Prefetching will be disabled
  The Prefetcher was introduced in Windows XP, think of it as a dumb version of Superfetch. It is still present in Vista and Windows 7, it works in a similar way but doesn't analyze your behavior so thoroughly. Application prefetching can speed up some application starts, boot prefetching can make your computer boot faster. On good SSDs, both should not be necessary.
  To disable boot and application prefetching on Vista and Windows 7 (I'm not sure about XP, can someone verify this?), type "cmd" into the start menu, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and enter the following (paste via right-click -> paste):
  
  Code:

  reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters" /v EnablePrefetcher /t REG_DWORD /d 00000000 /f

  To enable boot and application prefetching on Vista and Windows 7 (this is the default for Windows 7 unless it's running from a good SSD and Vista) (I'm not sure about XP, can someone verify this?), type "cmd" into the start menu, press Ctrl+Shift+Enter and enter the following (paste via right-click -> paste):
  
  Code:

  reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters" /v EnablePrefetcher /t REG_DWORD /d 00000003 /f

  All possible values:
  0000000 to completely disable prefetching
  0000001 to enable application prefetching only
  0000002 to enable boot prefetching only
  0000003 to enable both boot and application prefetching

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I'm not sure if Windows 7 would properly use TRIM in your case normally, but I DO know that at this point in time, TRIM on Windows 7 won't work anyway when using SSDs in a raid for lack of driver support.


Christoph