Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

moved to latitude thread.

 

So far I like the Vertex, it's faster than the two Patriot Warp 64GB's I had in RAID 0 and just as much capacity, plus it lets me have a 320GB WD Black for storage in the other drive. I haven't noticed the temps being high and I have it located on my leg right now. I've seen in reviews it may get a little hotter than a HDD.

It is possible to run two in RAID, but personally, I didn't want to do it anymore because I wanted more capacity. Plus, I don't think the crappy RAID in the M6400 will keep up. I've heard issues of poor battery life and extra heat (but that may be FUD).

The drive came improperly aligned so after a ton of benchmarking and trying different alignment sizes, I decided to align at 128. My drive came with the new firmware on it.

 

To Vista/32bit users:

if you are having issues with high idle CPU load (50%) caused by the IDT driver (stacsv.exe process): try to update to new version of audio driver.

I installed the new "06" driver that was released (yesterday?) for the M4400 (but driver should be the same for M6400)

So far it solved the issue for me.

 

I need to nab an extra battery, anyone suggest any places to pick one up??

 

it may be a stupid question but i just got my new m6400 with 8 gb and core 2 extreme and fx 3700 and wuxga, 2 250 gb hdd 7200 rpm and all the rest good stuff, my question is that my hdd are not raid, how can i convert them to raid and what is the benefit of having raid instead of whatever i have right now, also no problems with maya 9 and photoshop cs4 with dell nvidia stock driver, anyone suggest a different driver that gives me a bit more power but doesn't cause any problems

 

I doubt you can just convert them without doing some sort of backup/restore process.

However, here are the advantages/disadvantages of each option.

Non-RAID : (A) Two separate drive, stand-alone, 100% space. (D) No redundancy.
RAID-0 : (A) One BIG drive, 100% space, performance gain. (D) No redundancy, failure of one drive affects both.
RAID-1 : (A) One drive, mirrored data redundancy, performance gain on reads. (D) 50% space (mirrored), performance loss on writes.

Simply, the above performance comments is based on theory, and not actual tests.

I would suggest Non-RAID unless you need the extra speed of RAID-0 for video editing or disc intensive tasks. With the Non-RAID, get a simple backup program that will duplicate your important files every so often, or something like Acronis which will duplicate the drives (with compress) to one another.

Any way you go, I would suggest an external backup solution.

Hope this helps.

Case

 

Essentially that is what I do with an external HD. Any applications you would suggest to do auto backups??

 

that helped allot , thank yo very much

 

Another advantage of Non-RAID and although not a true backup, if you do go with non-Raid and buy an eSATA drive you can use the Rapid Recovery Volume feature of Intel Matrix Storage Manager. This will sync (mirror) one of your non RAID drives with the eSATA drive. Options are to continually sync (you plug in eSATA drive and it auto-syncs) or manual sync.

 

I have no advice on the Raid thing. Nothing except that it seems like a lot of trouble for scant returns. But I've never used it and only wonder what's the use of mirroring a drive in real time. If you screw up the one all you have is a copy of a screwed up system. And how much extra performance do you really get from the other Raid? I don't know but it violates my KISS computer system. Acronis True Image insures I'll never get caught with out a good backup and I just make a clone whenever sufficient changes are made and keep my second drive for other uses.

But what I need is some advice on is exactly what do I need to do to make drive 2 into drive 1 and vicee versee? My Covet came with two 320GB drives but I have a 64GB Samsung SSD I replaced one of them with. But it's just a millimeter or two thicker than a regular disk and while it's nothing serious it does make closing the battery cover a bit tight. I wish they had the drawers all my other Dells had for the drives but can live with this new setup. Everything I've been able to dig up on the subject concerned desktops and if somebody knows for sure how I can do this I'd appreciate any tips you can find time to pass along. Acronis can partition and clone, so that should make it easier but I still need instructions. And thanks in advance.