Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

my ideal config would be 2 drives in raid 0, and a small SSD for backup of important work files.

im contemplating getting a 32gb USB key or a CF card to use in my PCMCIA slot as a "solid state" backup drive.

 

I have been using raid 0 for years however not alone. I have a secondary network raid 5, and even a spare single drive for most important files. I edit HD content on a portable raid 0 when mobile for the speed benefit while making a secondary backup once a day. I agree definetly don't save your archives on a raid 0. Afhstingray sounds like your gonna have quite the data matrix.. Let us know how it all works out.

 

nah i was talking about the ideal situation, the m4400 dosent support dual drives....well...the second drive would be a 1.8 inch...so im not going to do raid 0.

i'll probably upgrade to a faster hdd. i reckon when the first 1TB laptop drives start hitting the market i could pick up a 500GB one for cheap hopefully end of next year.

most of my files are programs and media files which are non essential, that takes up the bulk of my hdd space. my important documents and projects come up to about 25 gigs. hence me contemplating the use of a 32gb usb key or CF card as a solid state backup (i dont trust burnt DVD's or external HDD's)

i think one of the 17inch sagers supports 3hdd's. haha would be cool to have 2 500GB drives in raid, and one superfast SSD for the OS and backups

 

If you remove the optical drive (it can be mounted in an external media bay), then the M4400 supports 2 hdd's:

support.dell . com/support/edocs/systems/M4400/en/sm/optical.htm#wp1181756 (sorry not allowed for me to post the URL without blanks)

 

yes i know, but it only supports the 1.8 inch drives....which are quite slow..

 

Is anyone running windows xp pro 32 bit?Or is this even advisable? Recently received a m4400 with xp64, but some specific software (dragon naturally speaking 10) i need will not run in x64. I attempted to install xp32 but it fails with a "stop error". I'm presuming some of the hardware (possibly 4gb ram) in the m4400 is causing issues for the xp installer.

T9600 2.8Ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB SATA, 512 nVidia FX770M

 

I'm running XP32SP3 just fine, and I don't believe DNS10 supports XP64, Vista64 should work though.

What is your reformat process?

 

Yes, DNS10 will not install on xp64. I'm booting off an XP sp2 install disc. I thought this might get me to the point where i can reformat the drive and do a clean install, but the Windows setup runs into a stop error at the point after it where it try's to start windows.

Would you recommend a different approach?

 

Hmm, that's strange indeed. I usually boot into the disc, delete all my HD partitions, create a primary C: (or more partitions if necessary), and just choose install on the new primary slot. You can try calling Dell to get the SP2 DVD exchanged, I have one and it installs just fine, shouldn't be a hardware problem as I'm running both Vista64 and XP32.

 

- I am running COD4 and COD5 on my M4400 - after 10 to 20 minutes - the games slow right down to a crawl. I've ruled out the network and drives - the only thing I can see is the graphice driver (NVDIA Quadro FX 770M) of a heat issue - it does run really "HOT". All drivers appear to be up to date. A question - how do you tell if its too hot?