Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

I voted! I'll post some screen pics later this weekend...

 

Has anyone heard that the 64 bit version of Ultimate does not support 2 HD's or RAID?

I was told by my Rep it did not, so I went with Business x64.

 

That is complete nonsense. I ordered mine that way, and it will work just fine.

 

There is no such thing as a "FFS mount". The free-fall sensor is a sensor and accompanying circuitry that is built into the hard drive, so it has nothing to do with the mount, or any other part of the system. Only the 7,200rpm drives that Dell offers come with this sensor, not the 5,400rpm ones. And if you buy these drives (the ones that has an FFS) yourself from some other place, you will have drives with a free-fall sensor. Hope this clears things up.

 

AHHHHHHHH. I feel like I must be annoying the hell out of all you. sorry

"And if you buy these drives yourself from some other place, you will have drives with a free-fall sensor."

Is this a pretty standard thing in 7200 drives in general? I bought one a year ago for another laptop and I dont remember it saying anything about this.

 

Do you have yours Pirx? And do you have Ultimate x64 with 2 HD's and RAID?
I am more concerned with 2 HD's than RAID. Please let me know so I can correct my order. Thank you

 

Question - would you see any benefit from configuring the two high-performance SSDs in a RAID 0 array? Any danger the SSDs would outrun the speed of the bus, or is the RAID interface set up fast enough to handle full bandwidth output from both drives to memory simultaneously? (And yes, freakishly enough, I'm actually considering it.) What is the interface Dell uses for the RAID controller?

 

Yes, you would see benefit from RAID 0 SSDs... No - you are nowhere close to saturating the 3GBPS link of SATAII. Realistically with SLC and 2 drives I would guess sustained IO of 200-250MBPS

It is the Intel chipset that provides the RAID interface - in this case the Q43 - that supports RAID 0/1.

The question is: Do you want to have your data fragmented across two drives to get that performance... I value my data more than a SSD IO increase... If it were me, I would buy more memory and let the OS pre-fetch and not page - Good results and sustained reliability.

 

Thanks MPF - but what is the real risk here? Aren't we talking about data loss only in the event of SSD failure?

I was actually thinking of both enough RAM to never page and SSDs, in order to provide faster boot application/data load times. (Color me impatient. )

 

I only have few minutes before going out to work.
Some simple answers:

1. The second HDD mount is included. I only order 1 HDD (5400 RPM 80G), and replaced 2 320G with FFS myself. It's quite easy.
2. My Screen is RGBLED, it's look nice when watching movie, playing game or editing picture/text in 1920X1200.
3. In max perfermance (with DVD running, playing game, using Wireless/BT), the battery life is around 90 minutes.
4. When playing game (Crysis), the fans are noisy but the temperature of the bottom side is relative tolerable (I put M6400 directly on my legs)
5. As previous forward by others, My 3dmark06 is around 10461

PS:I remember that there are 2 microphone near WebCam, but they didn't work.
PS2: My fingerprint sensor is also malfunction. I contact Dell and they plan to send a techician to find out what's wrong.