Alienware 17 - hard drive advice

Hey guys

I just bought an Alienware 17. It's coming with an 80GB mSSD used for caching a 1TB hybrid hard-disk.

I also bought separately a 240GB Samsung 840 Evo.

I would like to know what would be the best setup for the drives. I'll be using the Evo as a primary OS drive of course. But is there any benefit at all to keep the 80GB as a cache drive? I doubt I'll be using the storage hard drive for anything other than storing photos, videos etc... Most of my applications/games will be installed on the Evo.

Thanks for any advice you can give me on this!

 

Here is how I see it.

You have two options:


1. Set it as a caching drive and let the software decide what goes it.

2. Let it be a non-caching drive and you decide what to put on it.

It just depends on what you want. If I was you, I wouldn't set it as catching drive and use it as an extension of your evo. I on the other hand would use it as a caching drive because I use my hdd for most of my storage while only a select items get installed ( OS and few programs I won't stop using) on my 840 Pro

 

Thanks for the reply

What do you mean by using it as an extention of my Evo? Just install additional applications on it?

240Gb on the Evo is more than enough for what I need so I guess I'll just keep the 80GB as a cache drive.

I'll be doing a full format of the existing drives before installing my Evo and install Windows 8.1 pro on it. Is it easy configuring a SSD as a cache drive? Do I do this within windows or during installation?

Thanks again

 

set all the drives to raid 0

 

Use your new SSD for your boot drive and most common programs (office/email/etc) and use the mSATA to cache the HDD for faster storage drives

That's my setup and it works pretty good.

 

How do you set the mSata as a cache drive?

I will have 3 drives in total. One poster above mentioned setting the drives' modes as RAID. Is this the proper way to do it? Should I set my primary drive (Evo) as Raid as well?

Would appreciate some detailed instructions as to how to properly set this up. I haven't really found scenarios similar to this on the net. I really don't want to end up with a blue screen...

 

This: Chipset Software — Intel® Smart Response Technology User Guide

The BIOS stuff you should be able to ignore. The defaults are already set

I'm the same as Nick81 in the way I use my machine, so I'm only missing an msata cache drive for optimal performance. Just an extra few seconds for big game loads.

One thing I noticed in your OP was you said a hybrid drive? If it is then it already has internal SSD technology caching mechanical access. If it is hybrid then simply add both your SSD's together by adding it to your new drive as a RAID option.

Setting RAID active at the start of your project will not force you to use it but it has to be there or turning it on after install will probably end up with that blue-screen . You get maximum flexibility if the BIOS is in RAID out of the gate. Windows will (hopefully) detect the RAID compatibility and installs the correct Intel drivers for full support.

Good luck

 

Yeah, I think I'll set all drives as Raid as based on a bit of research I did, everyone typically recommend this mode over the others even if you have a Raid 0 setup. Having the drives in that mode allow you at any time to deploy a Raid set up without the need for a clean install of the OS. Who knows, I might get another Evo one day and set both SSD's in Raid 0

Anyway Amazon's been real slow to ship the SSD so I am only getting it tomorrow... Will be back to post the results of the installation!

So far I am 100% happy with my purchase. I got it off eBay, refurbished for less than half what I would pay for an entry level PREVIOUS gen Alienware in my country... i7 4700MQ, 16GB Ram, 80GB cached SSD, 1 TB hybrid, 8GB 880GTX... Could've gotten an Asus, MSI or Sager for a bit less but I don't regret my purchase one bit. The build quality of this laptop is out of this world. And the cooling is amazing. Considering it is 46 degrees celcius as I type this, this was VERY important for me and one of the reasons why I wrote off MSI laptops very early in my hunt for my next laptop....

 

Cool, or rather somewhat hot!! 46 C!!!! At around 38 degrees I go into thermal shutdown . Time for a cooling pad methinks.

Hope it all goes smoothly, good luck

 

Thanks!

Are cooling pad really useful? If so, which one would you recommend?

Anyway I was messing around with the laptop's BIOS and settings and I realized SSD caching wasn't even activated... Had to do some research to find out how to get RST to display the option to turn it on... Deleted the drive from Drive management, restarted and bam, the "accelerate"option appeared. Now my hard-drive shows as accelerated in RST so I am all set to install the Evo!

Had one more question though. Right now boot is set to legacy. Any reason at all to change it to UEFI? I personally would prefer keeping things the way they are, considering how much of a headache UEFI has been for me on my work laptop (Asus with Windows 8)

 

Most prople find them useful for lowering temps. Around 5c is a good number to experct. I see a lot of people reccomend this: Coolermaster Notepal U3 Cooler for Notebook - Black: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories . Myself I got this: Targus Laptop Cooling Pad/Lap Chill Mat fits 15-17 inch Laptops - AWE55EU: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories as it's nice and comfortable on my lap .

Interesting about the caching not being turned on. I wonder if it was because you have an aftermarket hybrid drive that is already SSD cached internally? If so then you might as well turn it off and add the space to the new evo as you will be double caching ATM.

UEFI, IMO avoid! It offers nothing but headaches on a private gaming machine. The technology is far too new as well. Only after the release of Win 8 are first generation UEFI laptops so it's still evolving.

Good luck.

 

I keep finding strange things in the laptop. Now that I sorted out the SSS caching, I stumbled into a new issue that kept me up til 2am last night...

I installed 3DMarks Vantage and 3DMarks11. 3DMarks Vantage gives me top marks for both GPU and CPU and in the graph I can see I am in the very top of similiar systems comparisons.

In 3DMarks11 it's a completely different story... GPU tests work flawlessly and I get a score of ~8900 if I remember correctly.
However the physics test are a disaster... I get a score of 2500 on both physics and combined test with a max fps of 7.5 in the physics test (in the graph, similar systems get upwards of 30fps).
Anyway I am going to create a separate topic for this. I don't want to mix this new issue with this topic...

 

Yeah, Dell never set up an 80gb drive as formatted NTFS - which is why the caching option did not appear until you wiped it. Sounds like it's had an interesting history maybe?

Did you confirm if the HDD is a hybrid?

I generally stay away from benchmark programs since they always end up showing me a problem I never knew I had. Actually I recall the last time ran 3DMark11 my physics was running through treacle. All games operating great - ignore and do not worry, probably a driver issue that will get fixed eventually - both OEM's create special code to address benchmarking programs in their drivers. I'm sure that physx is disabled so that AMD comparisons are more valid. The CPU bound physics code is used, the same as an AMD card. Do I care that under a scenario (using the CPU for physics) that I will never experience is messing up? Naah .

Depends on what you use your machine for but I prefer the in-game benchmarks that many games have now.

I'll watch for that thread - good call

 

Oh well I solved the problem in 5 minutes as soon as I reached home... I ran a very nice application I hadn't used before: HWInfo. It showed me that Turbo Boost was disabled... So I checked the BIOS one more time and couldn't find anything wrong. I decided to enable SpeedStep again. Don't ask me why, but that solved my problem....

Cpuz and HWInfo show a glorious core speed of 3.4Ghz and 3DMark11 give me a more acceptable score of 8200 now! When comparing with upper tier scores (not OC'ed) I can see that the only different are a few hundred points in the graphics test, equivalent to a max of 3 FPS...

Turns out also that the hard drive is NOT a hybrid. It's a mere WD Blue. Decent as a storage drive but NOT what was advertised on eBay. I have contacted the seller and will hopefully sort this out. But like I mentioned before I am not going to complain too much. Like I said, an entry level Alienware goes for twice what I paid for my laptop. I was weary a bit about buying a refurbished product but it's in MINT condition. Not a scratch, not a grain of dust on the screen. Ran all types of diagnostics already and everything's running fine.

 

Glad you found it. The speedstep thing makes sense since IIRC you turn that off to give you manual control over the core multiplier - which you probably do not have access to anyway.

As you say, not a problem with the drive config now you fixed it. You should notice a considerable speed-up on startup before you even get the SSD in. Sounds like a great buy.

Onwards...

 

Yeah, things are definitely running faster now. AND the seller refunded me a cool $50. Turns out he created the post based on an old one and forgot to amend the title which included the hybrid hard-drive. Any how I don't think I'll change anything for now. I am going to depend solely on the SSD for the OS and applications.

Oh man, Germany scored 4 goals already against Brasil... Let's focus on the match now

 

For me that would be the perfect machine to start with. The msata port is not easy to access and you can put all your disk hungry games on the data drive.

If you do it right you also get a quick rollback if you run into issues. All you need to do is put in the new SSD, change the boot order in the bios and boot to a win install CD (f12). The existing installation AND the caching will be unaffected and once you are happy with your new installation you can format the drive. To rollback just reset the boot order .

7-1!!!!!!

 

Just did exactly what you had suggested. Mission accomplished!

The laptop is a beast now... I really never expected performance to be THAT better with a SSD. I am not sure how I am supposed to use my work laptop now...

 

Haha, nobody expects just what a quantup leap an SSD is. A lot of technology is heading for retirement now, and HDD's should soon be cheap as chips .

 

haha...welcome to the SSD club ..... you will never go back, you can't, it will be to painful. Nobody really expects them to make that much difference until they can boot their computer in 12 seconds and have programs launch instantly and be done. I have SSD's in both my laptop and desktop but my wife and most family members don't. It actually hurts to use those computers when they need updating or fixing. I have slowly got them to start replacing them with SSD's as problems come up, but there are still many using just traditional HDD's.

I am with Micky on the mSATA front. Unless you REALLY want one, I wouldn't bother...they do speed up load times a bit for games and such but honestly they don't make enough difference to rush out and buy one, and as he explained they are a bit of a pain to install unless you really want to tear your system half apart

You would think so but the larger HDD's are still quite expensive . I have been waiting for the price to drop so I can get rid of my external drives and just install a few 3 or 4 tb internal HDD's for storage for all my media but it is still cheaper to buy the WD External drives then the internal ones .

I am actually expecting SSD's in the future to become cheaper once the tech gets there. We are already at 1tb SSD's and those have dropped dramatically since launch. The smaller SSD's are dirt cheap now and yet HDD's don't seem to be coming down as fast .