Survey: M14x owners with SSD's the forum needs you

I also was trying to use a HyperX 120GB SSD and I have had NO luck at all to install windows It keeps failing during windows installation in the middle of the unpack OR install. I swapped back to my Vertex3 and the installation went through flawless.

This is only an issue if I were to do fresh windows install. I cloned the drive initially and its working fine too; other than the fact that it was not aligned.

Did you have any specific step in order install windows with this drive?

Thanks for your help

 

Oh, as far as SATA 2 (3GB) speed on optional bay, I thought thats normal. I remember reading that there is only 1 of the SATA3 port.

 

I'm running Bios Version AO3, I haven't seen anyone post with that BIOS type I don't think. I'm concerned about whether I should buy an SSD, was thinking about the Samsung 830.

After reading all the issues I am still unsure. I don't know if its worth the risk of paying for a SATA 3 drive if It might mess up my PC. Or at least give trouble.

It seems to be a luck game. Some people get it, some don't at all.

Not sure what to do. And is SATA 2 really that much of a performance difference from SATA 3?

Does Dell have any explanation for the instability?

 

I'm sorry that you're so willing to settle for mediocrity when you spend money on a product that is supposed to be ahead of the game. I'm not saying this M14x will play BF3 at the highest resolutions, but having it not work with a simple hard drive is ridiculous.

I'm also sorry that you fall into that category of people that are willing to let companies walk on them, and can not see a fault even when it's glaring.

while it says SATA II, chances are that it won't boot with a SATA II drive in it, you have to limit it to SATA I speeds...

Dell won't own up to the fact that they screwed up so they can't explain what doesn't "exist." I notice a difference between sata II and sata III drives, but that's because I use them consistently. If you're coming from a mechanical drive, either will be a huge leap. I am a believer in future proofing if the cost difference isn't much, but a new tech drive may cause issues in your laptop.

 

Guys no one needs to justify anything....horses for coarse's.....

we are meant to be helping each other out with problems not criticising purchases.

Im glad your happy with your m14x Neo, i am to

but i do like having full sata 3 over my older sata 2 ssd , thats just my preference

 

Seems like SATA3 drives + A08 bios is 'OK' for most of the user. I used a Vertex2 drive and then upgrade to Vertex3 (SATA3, A05). Although I can see slight improvement on the change, I think the most prominent speed was upgrading from mechanical to SSD.

You should be able to find a lot of good 120GB SSDs nowadays at affordable prices ~$1/G, so definitely would recommend the upgrade

 

Your drive does not support SATA 3 though. So buying one for that speed was not very beneficial

It was disabled with bios AO8

 

Another reason for getting a Sata II SSD is power consumption. The OCZ 120gb SataII SSD runs at 0.3W idle, and 1.5W active. A sizeable difference from the typical 0.6W idle, 2.5W active Sata III models. Couple that with the Adata 2x4gb DDR3 1600 @ 9-9-9-24 sporting 1.28v that is sweeping the nation, and you got yourself a notable improvement in battery life.

I have both, and I'm easily running 6 1/2 hour battery life when fully charged. I'll post a screen shot and specs if need be.

 

Not to say I don't believe you, but I don't believe you. I barely get 3-3.5 hours of life out of mine surfing the web and what not. This and the other three I purchased all get about the same battery life. I'd love to get that kind of battery life out of mine, but I don't see how that's possible.

 

If I get a m14x with 6GB DDR3 at 1600MHz, is it still upgradable?

 

What do you mean? If you get 6GB of RAM there will be a 4GB stick and a 2GB stick, there is only two RAM slots. You can upgrade the RAM or HDD basically anything in the m14x

 

yo! I need to bump in here.
After looking at the speed from SSD, I would really like to purchase the upgrade over my current spinning HD.

I see most people are using:
Crucial M4
OCZ Vertex 2
OCZ Vertex 3
Corsair Force 3
Kingston HyperX SSD
or just plain Intel 320 for the sake of stability of booting?

I believe some are of SATA 2 and some are in the SATA 3 category.

I wonder to which SSD will be the stable one, stable is terms of no failure in booting into Windows. I saw some posts that they do have trouble in booting into Windows.

I am on bios A05, on i7, which I am not sure if this is helpful but I do appreciate the help given!

 

Obviously battery life is completely arbitrary, but for my classroom needs I usually achieve this kind of battery life.

 

A shot of windows battery life isn't something that is factual. Do you honestly get that much battery life out of yours? I don't see how your laptop can be different than the 4 m14xs I purchased.

 

It depends on your hardware upgrades based on low power consumption, and how you tweak your power saving settings. My m14x is tailor made to consume less power and run at minimum power options to achieve my desired battery life. I have the speed of a SSD, and low timing ddr3 1600 ram, at a fraction of the power consumption you use.

 

Installed a Corsair Force 3 240, a straight clone from stock 750GB drive, boot problem appeared with hanging on windows startup screen a couple of times, sometimes - not all of the time... was only getting SATAII speeds, removed Intel Rapid Store and now getting SATAIII speeds, max write 508, max read 544.... not sure if its cured the boot problem yet, will test tomorrow.

Next job put the stock 750 into dvd drive bay.

Test done through ATTO....

M14x
i7 2720QM
6GB DDR3-PC12800
A05 BIOS
GeForce GT 555M 1.5GB
1600x900
Killer Wireless
Win 7 64bit

 

I will be interested to hear whether your random failed bootup starts to re-appear when you ocupy the drive caddy
I have a force 3 180 and the only way to get 500 read and write speeds wad to uninstall the RST driver
When I did that I get disk read errors randomly during a warm reboot and chk disk errors during warm reboots all this randomly but it never happened until I removed the RST driver
The only thing different is I moved my 750 GB sata drive to the DVD Caddy right from the moment I installed my SSD so I am not sure if it is a conflict with the SSD and Sata being on the same controller or not....

 

Very interesting thread. I always wanted to upgrade to an SSD. Here's a (probably stupid) question. Say I install an SSD as primary. Then I move the original to the caddy replacing the optical drive and keep windows on that.

Q1. Would it boot with windows on the secondary drive?
Q2. Will it still have crash issues?
Q3. If I install games on the SSD, will I get a performance increase?

PS. I know that boot times will probably increase. But I am willing to sacrifice that for stability.

 

in case anyone is still collecting data
m14x black
i7 [email protected]
6gb 1600mhz ddr3
1.5gb gt 55m
wireless 1000
ocz agility 3 firmware 2.15

windows 7 pro
bios a08
no intel rapid thingy
reading at about 280mbs writing @ about 260mbs according to the last result i got from atto
no boot issues at all and ive restarted alot today from driver installs etc

windows experience score
7.4
7.7
6.9
6.9
7.5
no second drive installed no over clock etc all at stock settings

and noob353 ur game levels load a bit quicker only question i can answer

edit turbo boost disabled aswell

 

Smokeydog + rep so it seems Bios A08 helps with start-ups at SATA 2 when having a SATA 3 SSD. Very good news. However Dell lol ... why not going all the way to SATA 3 with stable startups? :laugh: DEll SMD

 

Thanks smokeydogsmokey. I think that is what I will do (as soon as I have some time to spare). But I am planning to swap out the optical though

 

yeah im gonna do the same as soon as i find the white bit for the ribbon mine broke

heres my start up time incase ur worrying about the sata 2 limitation Alienware m14x OCZ SSD start up - YouTube

 

Bought a Samsung 830.

Running BIOS AO3

Lets see how this goes...

 

Hardware:
Stealth Black
Intel® Core™ i7-2670
8GB 1600MHz DDR3 Kingston HyperX
Crucial M4 128GB
1.5.0GB DDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M
900p display

Software:
Running A05 BIOS
Fresh install with all recent drivers installed
intel rapid IS storage installed, although this may change soon
Device Manager is normal (fingers crossed here)
No secondary HD, although I'm planning on replacing my optical drive with the WD Black HDD that Dell installed (stock HD)

 

Finally got the time to install mine:

OZC petrol 3 128GB with Bios A08.

No issues what-so-ever.

PS: Thanks everybody who took their time to post here, it helped a lot

 

I am on A08, and willing to buy SATA III SSD,
so.....
as i understand there are few issues with SATA III, but SATA II is working perfectly.
So if install SATA III on A08, will it create any hardware issues.
read/write speed is not issue for now if i even get SATA II speed, its fine to me.

Hardware:
i7-2670QM @2.2Ghz
4GB 1600 Mhz RAM
1.5 GB NVIDIA GeForce GT 555M
900p Dispaly
BIOS: A08.

 

As far as i am aware there are no stability issues with proceeding down this path, you will just be limited to 285mb/sec read/write speeds due to the SATA II limitations. but it should work fine other than that.

 

I have installed my Corsair Force GT drive in my M14x with no issues. Running BIOS A08 so throttled to SATAII speeds, but I've had no stability issues at all so far.

Not running RST drivers.

 

Samsung 830 SSD, BIOS A05, Sata 3. No issues to date.

 

did you install Intel RST?

 

I have dell mobility ssd that provides dell with the purchase.

I'm wondering how many time is the useful life of this hard disks...
I think four-five years....

 

No. I did not.

 

I was having BSOD's randomly and all evidence was pointing to HDD failure. So I decided to try an SSD and I can hardly believe the difference. Really wish I could put one in my ipod and PS3. Here's my system info:

Hardware:
m14xr1
Intel® Core™ i7-2630QM 2.0GHz
4GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM (From Dell)
Samsung 830 128gb Firm ver 3
1.5GB DDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M
900p display
Dvd Drive in place

Software:
A05 BIOS
Fresh install
Dell drivers only
No Intel RST
Bluetooth disabled with no drivers (dont know why I paid the extra $20 for it.)

SATA3 Speeds according to Samsung SSD Magician.

 

Good choice with the Samsung!

 

You can put them in your PS3 - limited to original Sata speeds (1.5gbps) though

check it out http://www.hardcoreware.net/ssd-on-ps3-performance-guide/

 

Lol i know i should have done the research before posting that comment. While it still sounds like a pretty cool mod to do, i could not justify the price of the ssd for the performance gains. It seems to be only about twice as fast as the standard hdd.

Update on my new 830:

Still fricken awesome. I have not computed, until now.

 

I'm using a crucial m4 128gb with A05..when I put my laptop to sleep it wakes up but . Freezes. Anybody eleven having this issue?

 

have you looked over your event log for anything unusual?

 

Thx, I'll be doing so once I get off.

 

so if I drop in a samsung 840 ssd into my m14x r1 running a06 should I uninstall inter RST prior to using the sata to usb cable and backing up my stock hdd to the new ssd?

 

You don't need to uninstall the RST, just swap the drives and it should work.

 

thanks Karen! i finally got the samsung 840 ssd. I will report back when it comes and I transfer all my current data via the usb to sata cable.

 

Sure, let us know how it goes!

 

got my samsung 512gb 840 pro ssd installed in my m14x, and am getting sata 2 speeds. on bios a06. There has to be a fool proof way to get this to work sata 3!!

 

did you check this thread?

 

yep that fix didnt work for me, instead it may have bricked my gpu...

 

I have no issues at all with my m14x R2. I have reinstalled Windows 7-64, has the latest updates, all drivers installed. I have A10 BIOS and all other drivers up to date.

Hardware:
Nebula Red
Intel® Core™ i7-3740QM 2.7GHz
8GB 1600MHz DDR3 Ram (Hynix kit from Dell)
Samsung PM830 256GB mSata SSD
2GB NVIDIA® GeForce GT 650M
Mata DVDRW/BDROM UJ167
900p display

Pretty much all default software installed except the PowerDVD stuff. I also have numerous services disabled based on this list, under the "Tweaked" setting:

Black Viper’s Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Service Configurations | Black Viper | www.blackviper.com


Again, I've had zero issues with the laptop - no throttling, no freezing, crashing, stuttering, etc. Nothing, zilch. It operates perfectly.

 

r2's ddont have any problems. just r1's

 

Hardware:
Stealth Black
Intel® Core™ i7-2860QM 2.5GHz
4GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM (From Dell)
Samsung 512GB 840 PRO SSD
1.5GB DDR3 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M
900p display

Software:
Running modded A08 BIOS
intel rapid storage installed.
No issues in device manager (ie drivers missing)
Using the ssd as the one and only drive

I have issues when intel rapid storage isnt installed. I get the Proper read values (540mb/s) but write values are in the 100's. During benchmarking while writing, the drive slows down and freezes. Happens randomly doing other tasks as well. Once i install RST the system becomes stable again, but speeds drop to sata2