Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

They are SAMSUNG MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA00 2.5" 64GB SATA II drives. They are SLC drives, and the technical reviews had this drive out-performing the Intel X25 SSD's (which are MLC's).
I can't wait to slap those bad boys in tonite!

 

Some of us have been discussing the benefits/disadvantages of the E2E screen. It seems no-one has compared the E2E with the non E2E RGB LED. If there happens to be anyone near London with the non E2E please PM me. We could compare the two.

 

OK, I finally got my Covet yesterday, and I was up until 1:00AM reconfiguring and loading it (way past my bedtime)!!
I am thrilled to death with this unit, and couldn't be happier!
I am relieved to report that:
1. There was no decernable keyboard flex.
2. The E2E LED screen is marvelously bright. I don't have any lights behind me in my office at home, so reflection was not an issue for me. I do see the glass plate in front of the LED screen like others are talking about, but it is just fine with me.
3. Video card works flawlessly.
4. No driver issues or problems. I did hear it studder several times when it was playing the startup sound upon displaying the login window, but I see from the other posts that they are working on this, so it didn't bother me.
5. The orange color is warm and dark, and not obnoxius like the Gators football team orange or anything.

Here's a couple of pictures of this bueaty...



I went into the BIOS and changed the hard drive "Acoustic Mode" setting from "Bypass" to "Performance". The 3 available options are Bypass, Quiet, and Performance. Since I don't care if my hard drives make noise - I just want them to run as fast as possible, I chose Performance. Anyhow, the SSD's won't be making ANY noise after I get them in there (he he).

This is the first computer I've seen where the startup BIOS checks are all in graphics mode (no more MS-DOS looking boring startups). There is a green graphic progress bar that's pretty slick. Also, if you go into the F2 BIOS screen, everything is in GUI and mouse driven (another first for me). VERY NICE! You can tell right away that this machine is special.

Now, into the meat and potatoes of my posting... I had purchased the Covet from Dell with two 160GB, 7200 RPM drives hooked up as RAID 0 for performance, and then decided after the fact to purchase two Samsung Solid State Drives from NewEgg (MCCOE64G5MPP-0VA00 2.5" 64GB SATA II), and a good part of my evening was spent getting everything switched over. See the end of this posting to see the details on how I accomplished this (no small feat).
I took detailed measurements of the performance of the system with the twin 160GB 7200 RPM drives in the system, and I was blown away by how much faster the system is now. I truly am happy with the extra $1100 I dumped into these two Samsung SSD drives.

OK, first of all, here are the performance statistics BEFORE making the change over to the new SSD drives:
Note: I have the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad QX9300 CPU and 4GB of RAM + Vista Ultimate.

• Vista's overall Performance Index scrore is 5.9, and all 5 of the individual scores (processor, memory, etc.) are 5.9 across the board.
• Startup time was 53 seconds (not too bad!)
• Copying 4.7GB worth of files from one folder to another empty folder = 2:42 (30.4 MB/Sec)

Here is my HDTune performance results on READ activity BEFORE putting in the SSD's:


And here is these same performance measurements AFTER putting in the Samsung Solid State drives as RAID 0:

• Vista's overall Performance Index scrore is still 5.9, and all 5 of the individual scores (processor, memory, etc.) are still 5.9 across the board.
• Startup time is now just 30 seconds (jaw-dropping fast!)
• Copying 4.7GB worth of files from one folder to another empty folder = 1:03 (78.3 MB/Sec)!!!

Here is my HDTune performance results on READ activity AFTER putting in the SSD's:


Conclusions:
1. The startup time represents purely READ performance from the SSD's, and that increased by 43 percent (down from 53 seconds to 30 seconds)!!
2. The time to copy files from one folder to another involves both reading and writing on the SSD's, but for the most part indiciative of the WRITE performance. This increased from 30.4MB/Sec up to 78.3MB/Sec (158 percent increase)!!!!
3. The HDTune chart for the old 160GB, 7200RPM drives shows 103.8MB/Sec READ performance on average, with a significant drop-off in performance at the outer edges of the drive.
4. The HDTune chart for the new Samsung SSD drives shows an average of 116MB/Sec, which doesn't seem that much faster than the 103.8MB/Sec from the old drive's HDTune measurement. However, the chart is all over the place, spending a lot of time in the 130MB/Sec range, and dipping twice down to 60MB/Sec times, so it seems inconsistent. I don't think the HDTune can be trusted for testing the SSD's, particularly in a RAID configuration. This is why I did the real-world measurements of Vista Startup times and time to copy a block of files.
5. I could not test WRITE performance with HDTune because it warns that it is destructive and will overwrite the entire hard drive. No Thanks!
6. I have no idea why Vista's performance index did not increase at all, when clearly the system is running much faster now. Maybe 5.9 is the best score it is willing to give out?

How I accomplished the swapping out of the old drives for the new SSD's:
The first obstacle for me was that I knew that my Norton Ghost 14.0 refuses to restore a larger partition onto a smaller hard drive (my old total size was 320GB, and my twin 64GB SSD's only add up to 128GB), even though I only had 29GB of data on the 320GB drive). This was further exaspirated by the fact that Vista refuses to shrink the volume to a size under 128GB because of the stupid fr##$$@@ hidden system files it places at the end of the hard drive. Lots and lots of posts on the net about how to shrink a Vista volume, and most of them don't work.
Here were my steps. There was probably a more efficient way to do it, but this was a journey of sorts, with several bobs and weeves:
1. Purchased Acronis Disk Director Suite 10.0 ($49) and used that program to resize the main Vista partition to 100GB (the program took care of moving those hidden system files on its own).
2. Back up the entire hard drive to an external e-SATA drive (500GB Western Digital "my book" drive) using Norton Ghost 14.0.
3. Remove and Replace the drives with the new SSD's (much easier than expected).
4. Set up the new RAID 0 volume using the Control-I screens for the RAID controller.
5. Boot off the Norton Ghost Rescue disk and did the restore, including the MBR restore.
6. System would not start (locks up after the RAID controller screen displays). OK, aaaaaarrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh!
7. Booted off the Vista Premium Disk and performed "Repair" of the system. It said it fixed it, but it still won't start up. Bummed!!!
8. Repeated the same step 7 above one more time, and the "Repair" process seemed to go further into the system and repair something and asked to reboot. Now it displayed "NTLDR is missing". CRAP!!
9. Next thing to try was to install Vista fresh, just to get it to initialize the MBR and other startup stuff just the way it wants it, and prove that it can actually boot off this SSD RAID volume, and then restore it from the Ghost backup afterwards. This worked. After I installed a fresh Vista and could boot it, I then booted off my Norton Ghost Rescue disk and ONLY restored the Vista partition and NOT the MBR, and it worked after that.
WHEW !!

What was pretty amazing along the way is that both times when I was restoring my hard drive from the e-SATA backup drive, I was astonished to see my entire hard drive restored in only 3 minutes. Even though it was only 29GB of stuff on my hard drive, it is still quite impressive just how fast that e-SATA interface runs!

Anyway, hope you enjoyed this review.

 

thanks for the review, it was extremely helpful. btw....i graduated from UF and I happen to like the orange of the gators footall team...LOL

 

Sickenna, your problem is you haven't enabled the write back cache on you drives. I have the same drives as you and I was originally disappointed by the 70MB/s - 140MB/s read speeds knowing what these drives are capable of. After enabling the write back cache I achieved 180MB/s to 200MB/s read performance.

Good Luck!

 

...and I'm up here in Tallahassee with the Seminoles, so I won't be talking to you any more after that spanking defeat you guys just handed us over Thanksgiving!

 

This seems wrong. Enabling the write-back cache should only affect the WRITE performance, not the READ.
I had not even seen this setting, and I will definitely be giving it a try to see what happens. I am always "plugged in" anyway and have regular backups, so I'm not afraid of enabling this. Where is this setting at? In the Control-I RAID controller screen or in the F2 BIOS screen? I looked in both places and can't find this setting.

 

You can see if it's enabled by opening the Matrix Storage Manager in windows and clicking on the "Array" container. If it's not enabled you need to open device manager, expand the "Disk drives" tree, right click on "Array" and click properties. Then click the "Policies" tab and check the "Enable Advanced Performance” option. You can verify it's enabled by re-opening the Matrix Storage Manager and if it's not you don't have the correct array driver installed. I would normally only enable this feature on controllers with a battery backup but since it's a laptop there is little chance of an abrupt power failure.

 

ahhh come on...im at grad school at columbia now so you can consider me a lion.

 

OK, I found it, and HOLY CRAP!! Lookie here...



I'm getting READ peaking out at 339MB/Sec on almost 80% of the drive, and the lowest it is getting is a measley 176MB/Sec!!
I don't really understand how a WRITE-back cache could increase READ performance, but there it is!
Thank you sooooo much for showing me this.
This machine is a ROCKET ON STEROIDS!