All in one thread - SSH Warning/Cloning Help/Aliensense

I recently purchased an m17xR3 with some goodies. I ordered it with twin 500gb Solid State Hybrid drives. Seagate momentus XT's to be exact.

I've had the laptop for over two months now, and wasn't impressed with the hard drives speed. When I saw there was a firmware update to increase the speed of the drives, i was quick to try it out. I blindly clicked through it not realizing that it wasnt meant to be applied to a raid array. The hard drives didnt brick themselves, but i do get an error on boot asking me to press any key...no big deal. So i checked into a reversal process from seagate and saw where they said the update could be applied to a raid array, and it listed model numbers......

SOOOO, I got into the raid bios on boot and wrote down the model number of the drives and checked those against seagates website..... I had been given normal 7200.4 momentus drives, not solid state hybrids. I was floored!

I pulled the back off the computer and double checked the stickers on the drives and low and behold, I did not have what I paid for. After searching the dell site, I couldnt even find standard momentus drives available.

After 2 hours of fighting with dell to get the right department, and the right supervisor, I now have 2 momentus XT's being overnighted with system discs and a 1TB external to complete a clone or image with and transfer my system to the new drives.


So for anyone who has purchased a Solid State Hybrid, it may behoove you to check the model number in the bios, or pull the cover and see if it says momentus or momentus XT.



ALSO.... What would be the best way to transfer my 800gb of files from a raid0 to a usb 3.0 external, back to a different raid0? Clone? Image? Ghost? Acronis? Something Else? Just trying to figure out the best way.



And, while im here and not wanting to start multiple threads, I got alien sense working via installing the old command center and then uninstalling and reinstalling the current one. Its neat once you log in enough to get a decent recognition profile built....wish they would release a working version so i could configure it and use it for websites.... Im pissed that it was advertised with aliensense, and then doesnt come with it at all!!

 

Unfortunately Alienware never wanted the Web Login feature in AlienSense and it was never included. At this point it will not be added as they've stopped including the software altogether.

Where specifically did you see the feature being advertised? I'd like to look at it directly.

There is good news, however, in that the technology still exists in the form of software called FastAccess. Current versions of FastAccess support Chrome, IE and Firefox (except for Firefox 8 which we're currently working on an update for). It's available on many Dell platforms or you can get a copy from the Sensible Vision website.

Let me know if there's anything else that we can do to help.

 

Hi, Crash!
Good to hear that they solved your problems with the drives,
What i would suggest is that you could just use regular "drag and drop", if you know what you're going to move.
USB 3.0 is pretty fast, especially if you have an RAID-setup allready, so it shouldn't take that much time!


And back again, it will be even faster, as the read speed is much higher on the external disks, and your raid with hybridSSD's will give you an awesome boost aswell. (Might reach the theoretical speed for USB 3.0?)


- Scott.

 

I could have sworn that i saw it in a media advertisement for a 17xr3 back when i was shopping in august. But now when I pull it up it doesnt say anything about aliensense. its a neat concept, as long as the lighting is consistant. And I just assumed that it worked for the websites like the main software, thats a neat feature as well. I think it would best be used on a desktop though.


As for the hard drives, I ended up burning an alienware recovery disk set, then used acronis to back up everything. Then I initialized the raid array, loaded the alienware recovery, then ran acronis which re formatted everything and put the recovery partitions back in. (the acronis disk I made wouldnt work from the blank hard drive for some reason, so I had to do the alienware recovery first.

The boot is much quicker now that I have the hybrids, and I havent noticed any problems in media playback from movies or anything.

As for usb 3.0 x-fer speeds. Ill generally see 75mbps on a single transfer

 

Indeed, the Web Login feature is easily the most popular and is quite useful. Regarding lighting, the learning algorithm allows AlienSense (and it's cousin FastAccess) to very quickly learn the user in a wide variety of lighting conditions. I personally use one of my copies on a laptop and it works extremely well. In fact the vast majority of FastAccess users run it on a laptop.