Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

Much appreciated.

 

Very helpful. Thanks.
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Okay since the mechanical HD's are quiet, much less expensive, much larger, and give approximately the same battery life as a SSD I'm going with the tried and true 'old world' technology for now

 

Follow up on my instructions for how to magically move your Dell factory disk onto a new, better, cheaper one:


I just tried my instructions on my Covet and they worked, but with one slight change due to how Dell does their preinstall.

Dell's pre-install environment is not like HP's. HP's environment formats the drive. Dell's does not. This means an extra step, but it was a breeze!

The original instructions work. To recap:

1: Obtain a Linux boot CD. I recommend Kubuntu.
-- Easiest thing is to download from kubuntu.org and burn it.
2: Plug both drives into the laptop and boot from the CD.
3: Launch a terminal window and type 'sudo su -'
4: Determine which drive letter is which disk (sda, sdb, sdc, sdd...)
-- Method 1: watch the /dev folder while you plug / unplug a drive
-- Method 2: type 'fdisk -l' and compare sizes.
5: Type 'apt-get install gddrescue' (this works for Debian and related linux, like Kubuntu.)
6: Type 'ddrescue [source] [destination]
-- (example: ddrescue /dev/sda /dev/sdb)

... wait for about 20 minutes for it to finish and power off the machine.

7: Put the new drive permanently in the laptop and boot normally.

New last step: Fix your windows partition size.
In Vista this is really easy.
Right-click on "Computer" and click Manage.
On the left, go to Disk Management.

You will see a disk with, probably, 4 partitions. 3 will be blue, one will be black for unused space.

Right-click the partition marked "OS (C: )" and click on Extend Volume.

It will give you a slightly confusing window. It's just asking how much you want to extend the partition by. Put the number as high as it will go and do it. Vista will extend your OS partition, live, without even a reboot.


If you have XP, I believe you will need a third-party utility to extend your partition size. Vista is the first windows OS to support growing and shrinking partitions natively.

In XP, you can always just make another partition for the empty space.

Now I can have a 320 and a 500 in there instead of a 160!

 

My method for transferring the factory Dell image to your own drive should work in this case also, except that you have to create an image file instead of just going direct. (Good to have anyway, in case booting from the RAID confuses windows, and you have to go back.)

ddrescue /dev/sda [file]
create raid volume
ddrescue [file] [raid0]

[in brackets] means I can't know what the drive would be called or where the file would be located.

Vista seems to cooperate fairly well with direct block-for-block data imaging. My 160GB drive imaged in about 20-40 minutes and worked flawlessly. You'd just image your OS drive to an intermediate file on a portable drive, create your RAID volume, then image from the file onto the RAID volume.

I sort of doubt the utility is capable of turning a single drive into a raid-0, live and preserving data, but that's just because that feature is usually only available in the highest of the high-end dedicated raid controller boards.

 

On one benchmark it seems. As does the 1700m. I wouldn't worry about that too much - Real word performance would be different. However, if you are only doing OpenGl work then I'd take a closer look.

 

Good choice. You'll also be happier because Dell is apparently still putting the older Samsung MLC Solid State Drives that have the 1 second pause times where your computer will lock up for up to 1 second while it tries to write random data to the drive. They didn't want to put the better Intel X25-M SSD's that don't have this issue into the laptops (large purchase lockout agreement with Samsung?).

 

I don't think that's the case. All Samsung SATA II SSD are in fact SLC and the SATA MLC drives are no longer manufactured.

 

should i take a better cpu or gpu?
my current are 2.8 ghz dual core and 2700m

 

WRONG -- The 128GB Samsung SSD is MLC - not slc

 

Depends on what you need it for, if you have to choose.