Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

it would be nice to have a wall/air/auto - power adapter especially for business trips, well with hopes you have room to unfold this behemoth in your seat, Ive been witness to seeing this in person, a 17" laptop does not really unfold on a airplane of course i was flying @ the back of the bus. You may have a little more room up in first/business class. A 12 cell is another accessory that I am going searching for as well.

 

With (2)7200 rpm drives in RAID you would see about 80Mb/s - 100Mb/s of throughput but I would not recommend this configuration. With striped 2.5" mechanical drives your very likely to see a hard drive failure during the life of the notebook especially with 2 of them in a striped configuration and you only need to lose one to lose all of your data. With (2) Samsung SLC SSD drives (Dell’s current offering) in RAID 0 configuration you should see 180MB/s – 200MB/s of throughput which is impressive especially for a notebook but the real performance increase will be from the reduced seek time of which SSD’s have virtually none. Also with SSD drives you can safely use them in a RAID 0 configuration because being solid state they are not susceptible to damage from heat or vibration and with no moving parts are much less likely to fail compared to their mechanical brethren.

 

Yeah, I totally agree about not using "RAID" 0 (which when you think about it, isn't really even RAID). I'd ESPECIALLY not use it on a notebook where the chances of a hard drive failure are even higher.

A single Intel SSD is faster than two fast desktop drives in RAID 0 though, so...for a notebook a single one for maybe the OS and critical apps, combined with a good 7200RPM drive for other things?

It depends-probably mostly on platter size. I wouldn't worry about power draw or weight though. There's probably some minuscule difference, but nothing worth worrying about.

 

Here is the first expert review for the M6400.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/taxid;567450213;pid;6935;pt;1

 

Since the M6400 has an external E-SATA port I went with the dual SSD's. I'll be installing Server 2008 x64 w/Hyper V to run multiple VM's I have a requirement for high I/O on the system drive and more than 64GB of space. I plan purchasing an external 2.5" 320GB 7200RPM E-SATA drive for extra storage. Being a consultant I need to take my testing environment with me.

 

cool... so will i be able to get up to 180MB/s – 200MB/s of throughput with just 1 ssd drive or do i need 2...?

seriously thinking about ordering and extra 2 ssd's now and ditching the 320gb i got with the covet.. if i do should i go for the 80gb intels or the 60gb samsungs..? if i do put the intels to i mess up the warranty..?

my laptop is my workstation so i need it to be as quick as possible.. got photoshop / flash open all day and sporadically xsi...

 

M6400: What is the likelyhood of a 2nd battery option for the modular bay?

 

I still don't see the 12-cell battery. Does it exist?

 

Intel's new drive hits over 200MB in read tests, and over 100MB in write tests (though I'm sure if that was sequential or random (which is always MUCH lower than sequential). Either way, that's crazy high.

The SSDs in this are a lot slower though, though still good.

And you can replace hard drives on a Dell without hurting the warranty, though the new drives won't be covered, and you might have to switch them back to get coverage for something else. (Which is just fine for me, as personally there's no way I'd send in a drive with personal data, so I plan on buying a separate drive when I get my laptop anyway.)

 

2x64GB is not large enough for all my apps and data.
Also the cost is very high. Otherwise I agree with your other comments (less heat, less weight, etc).

HD in my Inspiron 5000e is still going strong after 8 years of heavy use.

Are 7200rpm HD's more likely to fail?
Or is there something about the striped configuration that puts extra heavy wear on the HD's?

Thanks.