Anyone tried the Intel 320 600GB SSD on the m17x?

I'd love to hear that people love it and it works wonderfully, etc. The other question is if I can just clone over the OS to the new SSD then switch boot drive, or if I'll need to re-install.

Thanks in advance, my m17x has yet to be delivered and I have one of these incoming so I'm thinking about how I'm going to go about reinstalling the laptop. Any tips are welcome and appreciated!

 

I don't have any personal experience with this drive, as it costs as much as a cheap car lol..But it is an intel drive which is well known for their reliability with SSDs. Performance wise, it is not as far from previous generation Intel x25-m G2 (some even state that the G2 performs better but this is controversial)

Just a thought, why don't you get a SATA 3 6GB/s SSD? The 320 is SATA 2 and your M17x will be SATA 3 capable..So might wanna check out Intel 510, OCZ Vertex 3, Crucial C400..These SATA 3 drives will perform better than any SATA 2 drive will..Vertex 3 is the best choice IMHO..

Cheers

 

Wow. I doubt you will need 600GB

Why not get a 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 with a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT? It will be waaay cheaper than what you're thinking about getting. If you really need the extra space you can just get the 600GB Western Digital Velociraptor

Or Raid 0 two OCZ Vertex 3 240GB, it will give you 480GB (ofc you won't get all of that when actually setting it up) and it will still cost you less than what you would pay for that 600GB intel. Not to mention it would probably triple its speeds. Best alternative imo.

Sorry if I'm not answering your question but imo buying a 600GB ssd is a waste. With that money you could have easily bought just a single ssd, and have your 2nd caddy for storage. Or go along with my path and raid 0 two OCZ Vertex 3

 

Because the 600GB Intel is "one drive to rule them all" as the best size for the price. The cost/gb goes down by moving up to this size. The only thing smarter would be if Intel were to bring a 450GB model in between the 300 and 600.

And yes I have one on order, but it's going into an M18x

 

I have the momentus in the m11x-r1 which has been good since the d24 bios update (but infuriating before that), but I like the idea of using the 750gb for movies and such and the 600gb for os, games, dev environments and virtual machines. Then I'll have 1350gb of awesome storage in this awesome machine

Sorry if that seems wasteful, but the drive is something I'm receiving as a gift.

So do you guys think I'll be able to clone or will I need to do a full re-install? I'm assuming that I'll want to do the latter for AHCI related reasons.

 

So I can report that this drive is fairly awesome, and that the (Acronis based) intel drive cloning tool worked like a champ. Here's what I did:

What you'll need:

Screwdriver, drive, and the intel 'data migration assistant':

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=19324

0) Did first boot up stuff (installed updates, a few small applications, nothing major)
1) Installed the ssd into the 2nd drive caddy.
2) Used the intel tool to clone the drive. The clone tool will not install without detecting the ssd.
3) Entered the bios and swapped the boot order.
4) That's it.

I didn't muck around with raid/ahci settings, for what that's worth. I'm letting my games and apps live on the ssd, and all the media stuff are on the FDC.

Now if I could only kill off the OSD. Any tips?

 

Are you talking about the OSD that appears when you hit the FN or media buttons? If so, you just uninstall that in the control panel. That's all I've ever done to get rid of it anyhow.

 

I thought it was not recommended to clone to an SSD drive because of alignment issues..? But more and more people are doing it without any issues..

 

Thank you very much for the confirmation that the Intel migration program worked out for you. I will be installing an Intel 510 250GB as soon as my M17x shows up. Did you run the migration from within windows or boot of a DVD? I'm also currious what the shipping drive configuration was on yours. I have on 320GB on my confg. Thanks again.

 

I had worried about the same but I think I will at least give it a try if others are having good results.

 

I also forgot to ask the OP if he was able to do just the OS partition without the restore partition. Maybe if I had 600GB of SSD goodness I would do both but with "only" 250 I'll be more miserley?

 

So I didn't do -anything- special. I ran it from windows, and let it do its cloning thing. It might have alignment issues? I would think that migrating to a 250 would work out so long as you didn't have piles of stuff on your drive.

I do plan on visiting the page file stuff in windows 7 and put that off on the plattered drive.

RE: OSD, I haven't found a way to disable it in the command center application, nor in any control panel. I've not uninstalled/removed quickset though.

 

I wanted to get an Intel drive because of the migration software to save myself a headache, but I ordered a Corsair drive already..is it and Intel branded version of Acronis that comes with it? Wondering if they modified it in some way to align the drive..I'm just a bit confused because I thought that by cloning, you risked alignment issues and would not be able to enable TRIM since it only works on ACHI? Not sure how you would be able to check if TRIM is enabled, but I'm assuming through SSD toolbox..

 

cdibona, Can you run this to see if TRIM is enabled on your drive? If it is then I'm probably going to use respawn once my drive arrives. Thanks!

How to activate TRIM on SSD Solid State Drives

 

I have the 600GB 320 on my M15X, it works well... the only issue I had was it did not come with a SATA to USB cord, so I had to snag one. Also, for some reason the migration software would not recognize my SSD. I called Intel, who stated that sometimes if you are using an brand "other than intel" SATA to USB, the software will not recognize it. I ended up downloading a free trial of Acronis and it worked great. As far as performance, it is a way quicker than the samsung P800 SSD that came with the M15X. The 4K read and writes are not as quick as some of the other newer SSD's however, I bought it for the space and reliability.

 

Looks like it:

C:\Windows\system32>fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify
DisableDeleteNotify = 0

Also, JAD, I first tried to install the data migration software before I installed the drive, but that was futile as it does check for the presence of the ssd. It might have all worked well because I installed the drive on the machine and pivoted to boot off of it? Who knows...

 

Why not just put the Intel SSD into the second drive bay? Is their a reason we should use USB?

Did you clone the restore partition also? Thanks.

 

Thanks man. I'll definitely try cloning first when i receive my drive.