Help with SSD srive

Hey people,

My M17 came with an SSD drive, shoudl be OS have been installed on there? as its blank and currently installed on the normal drive. Im guessing it woudl be better to installed the OS on the SSD so it runs faster, do i simply restore my image onto the new drive then format the old one? will i lose any installed data like games?

Thanks

 

Where did you get the machine? What size is the SSD? If it is 80gb it should have been setup as a cache drive and you do not 'see' it at all. Gives you SSD like speeds most of the time .

This is the second machine I have seen recently that has been setup like this!

I'll give you a fix if it is 80gb (or 64gb) . No need for a reinstall but you will need to backup any data/games on the SSD drive as it will all disappear and links break. You end up with only the C drive...

HTH

 

Well i bought it off someone, but it was brand new, its the new gen M17 with 1tc HDD and i think the SSD drive is 80gb but yeah might show as 60

Sorry mate i dont get what you mean by back up the games on the SSD? i currently install them on the C drive, so do i not need to use the SSD drive then?

 

No prob, I make assumptions until I get a feel for the technical level of a poster .

Basically how it should work is using the hardware to create a cache drive on the SSD. Whenever any disk read occurs it looks to the SSD first. If it has been loaded once then it will be there until the drive fills up. Then older files are replaced.

First thing to do is see if ANY of it is already setup for caching. Look on the taskbar for a program IRST and fire it up. If it shows a cache then all you are seeing is a 'remainder' drive pointing at the free space left after caching. This has to be manually setup.

If caching is not available then the drive will need wiping before you are allowed to use it. Go into disk manager and delete the partition on the SSD is on. Then it should be available to setup : Chipset Software — Intel® Smart Response Technology User Guide. Ignore all the bios stuff, it should already be setup. As long as you see a wall of text about the drive config before the bios load screen then it is 'cache ready' .

Hope it's getting a little clearer but ask away, a very confusing subject!

Important: I have seen machines where the SSD drive holds the windows boot files but it is running off the other one. In this case after removing the SSD partition the machine will not start and errors 'Operating System Not Found'. I repaired this with an original windows CD boot and select repair options - took two runs. A windows expert will probably have a much better solution?

Good luck

Edit: To clarify, you will not see the SSD at all, it sits between your HDD and SSD speeding things up. If you have not installed anything to the SSD then you should just need to turn on the caching, simples

 

Hey there!

I think the Alienware I just purchased has the exact same configuration as yours. 80GB SSD + 1TB.

What I did though is buy a 240GB Samsung EVO SSD that I set up (just yesterday actually) as my OS drive and kept the 80GB as a cache drive for the 1TB which will be used primarily as a storage drive.

Performance of the laptop is just ridiculous now...

 

Sure is sounding like someone is supplying them configured badly. That's why I asked about where - if this IS dell then they need to fix their image ASAP!

 

Yeah, this is what the seller told me. The laptop was still in a sealed box from Dell, yet the 80GB drive was partitioned and set as a normal drive. I DID buy mine refurbished so not sure if that's the reason. In any case it only took a minute to rectify but still found it strange.

 

Thanks that makes a bit more sense now, so i need to check if it is cached then if not enable it, so if its enabled can i still use it to store things on?

 

Boxed and refurbished (by dell) should have the correct config. One could slip through if the original owner set the machine up that way and all the 'refurbishment' work was simply loading a fresh disk image. Two occurences so close together and someone is following a wrong process.

Maybe one of our Dell reps here can have a word internally - did you get full dell warranty? If so the service tag can be traced by dell to see when and where it originated - never publish this info! I'm sure if this is originating inside dell they will want to fix this?

 

yeah i think mine was a refurb too

 

Correctamundo , as long as there is spare space remaining after the cache is created then it's your's to use.

 

Cool thanks, im sure ill be back later with more questions

 

Yes I did get Dell warranty. Just had to use the transfer of ownership on Dell's website to transfer it from the seller to myself.

In any case I am not complaining about anything... The laptop doesn't have a scratch and there isn't a grain of dust on both the outside and inside. I live in Dubai and for the price I paid for this beast, I would've gotten an entry level Asus ROG or a 2 year old entry level Alienware... If I wanted to, I could put an ad right now to sell it for 3500 USD and I'd get a call in the next 15mins... If I had the patience I could just do it and then buy an Alienware 18, but I guess I am just happy with what I have now

Electronics are very expensive here. For example the 840 Evo I bought cost me around 160USD with shipping, from Amazon UK. In most retail stores I checked here, it is priced at 250USD...
Last week I asked from a couple suppliers for a quote for 4GB of RAM and a 146GB 10k hot swap hard-drive for one of my company's servers (HP DL380). The lowest price I got was, honest to God, 200USD for the ram and 180USD for the hard-drive... A quick search on eBay and Amazon found GENUINE ram for 50 USD and hard-drive for 110USD...

 

Did you move to Dubai or were you born there?

 

I'm guessing a US based seller? It's unlikely anything to do with them since they will just be 'box-shifters' but at least it was an easy enough problem to fix and you are very happy with the machine .

I would think that a lot of people would not even notice, 'it says SSD and I see an SSD so all OK'. When the caching was first introduced the opposite calls for help came in - 'where is the SSD I ordered?' since it is not in explorer if set up corrently.

 

Yep, US seller over eBay.

Actually I had researched the subject quite a bit so I knew something was wrong the minute I saw the SSD in explorer. I wish more people would take the time to look up things on the internet before panicking. I've yet to face a technical problem without easily finding a clear solution already available on the net.

@Matty

Nope, I just live here. Great place except in the summer...Temperatures go up to 50 degrees celcius and humidity up to 90%...

 

ah nice, im planning on moving there myself at the end of the year, been looking at places around the Marina area, where do you live?

@Micky I don't seem to have that IRST program anywhere? also my ssd is showing 54gb

 

If you see a drive letter allocated to the ssd then caching is probably not setup.

You can get the program and the drivers in one download from Dell: Driver Details | Dell UK.

If you look at your disk drivers in device manager it should say Intel RAID for the driver. Also you must have the bios in the correct setting. The default is RAID 'on' and if you see a wall of text about the drive config when you power up this is all in place.

Once you get to that point see if IRST shows ANY RAID arrays or caching. It is possible that an SSD is partitioned to be both a cache and data drive. The maximum cache is 64gb, minimum 32gb, so any remaining can be added to an existing drive or run as a desperate drive letter. Unlikely your machine is set up this way but best to check before deleting stuff .

Once setup the caching and RAID do not rely on any software, only compatible disk drivers. So even if IRST is not on your machine it could all be set up?

Good luck.

 

I cant see anything that says RAID in the drivers under device manager, but there is a tick in the drive caching box if that means anything

 

This is where you need to see the driver name. Sorry, I wasn't clear where the info is



That tick is only for delayed writes to speed up access at the cost of safety. If you install the IRST package it will install the correct drivers.

Do you see all that stuff about the drive config on power up?

Sounds like the machine has had a 'clean' install at some point...

 

ah yes sorry I was looking under harddrives, but under storage controllers I can see the same as what you posted, it says sata RAID controller

 

Great then it is all in place. That controller will not install if the bios is not in RAID mode (I believe). Install IRST if you don't have a taskbar icon, and see what it says. Looking good....

 

Yeah the Marina's really nice but there's lot of traffic. They're getting things ready for the tram (lots of construction) and they opened a few months ago an "open air" shopping mall with a cinema.
Definitely a nice play to stay though, especially if you're bringing a family along. You can just cross the street and go to the beach.

I live in DIFC (financial center) next to Downtown Dubai (near Dubai mall and Burj Khalifa). Closer to my wife's work place and children's school.

 

I have the icon now and its been installed, but it says service not running, when I try to open the app it says trying to connect?

@Nick I would be coming on my own, so just been looking at 1 bed flats over there, id be working at Internet City but I heard you can get a cab there cheap enough

 

That's strange, sorry never heard of that. I assume you have restarted? Do you see the RAID config screen when you power up? Try the hotkey that comes up (Ctrl-K) and see if you get the options to configure it.

It might be something to do with other intel drivers. Maybe reinstall the chipset drivers as well, search dell downloads with your service tag to list them all.

 

Yes I get this menu when I press control and I. It gives me options but also says raid0 stripe 52gb
Raid0 cache 21.gb

I'm assuming this is the ssd? Underneath it shows my main hd saying non raid disk then the ssd cache disk, looks like it's a 74gb drive

 

Sounds like exactly as I thought it might be. Someone has setup the smallest cache and formatted the rest. They do come with an (nominal) 80gb cache drive so the numbers are close enough. Does it boot sub 15 seconds?

Did you manage to get the windows program to work?

 

Yeah, Internet city is very close to the Marina. You can check out Jumeirah Lakes Tower or Tecom for a bit cheaper alternatives. The best choice though if it's within your budget is to go for Jumeirah Beach Residences (in Marina) which is right on the beach.

 

Thanks ill check them out, might pop over for a weekend in a couple of months to check the place out and see what its like, its quite a big descision to move! do you prefer it than th UK?

@Micky, id say it took about 20 seconds to get to the log on screen

 

Hmm, seems like the cache is working but I have no reference point except pure SSD? Did you try reinstalling the chipset (Intel) drivers from dell drivers?

 

No, ill give that a go later though, i did update to all the latest ones when i got it a few months ago, the windows program still doesnt seem to open either

 

I'm wondering if it some sort of mismatch between the firmware settings (at that initial screen) and the windows configurator? You could try to delete the cache (you want a bigger one anyway) and see if the windows prog will connect then?

Or even call AW support. Maybe they have something in their knowledge base?

 

I am not from the UK
I am from Lebanon.

But don't worry, most expats here are very very happy. After all it's a tax fee country! Life CAN be very expensive though. Lots of temptations here. Banks will shower you with credit cards and offer for personal loans.
If you don't pay attention you can easily find yourself stuck in debt. You're going to see lots of people driving exotic cars, going out every single day of the week, dressing in designer clothes. This doesn't make everyone a millionaire. Most of them are practically living on credit. As long as you don't fall in this trap you'll be fine.

One other advice if you ever come here, learn about the culture and rules here. The UAE is a VERY open country but it's still a Muslim country. You don't want to drink and drive. Drugs are practically your ticket to a VERY VERY long jail term. Some people got thrown in a cell for just forgetting less than a gram of pot in a pocket... You don't want to disrespect locals or even get in trouble with them. For women, this isn't Rio. You WILL get in trouble if you parade half naked in broad daylight...

Those are TINY things to follow and really not hard. I've been living here for almost 10 years and I've yet to have any problem. The benefits you get here are worth it. You can get a great salary, quality of life is great, there's hardly any crime of any type here and most people I know would consider it a tragedy or punishment to be sent back home in Europe, Australia or the US...

 

hi

I wonder if you can help me, what did you need to do to add the 250gb ssd to your system, and get the OS to boot from the 250gb ssd, and keep the 80gb msata ssd caching for the 1tb drive?

I have been reading through the post and it looks like it all depends on have it was setup by the factory? very confusing...

I have exactly the same machine as you on its way to me, should be here friday and this is the first thing i want to do after i have created the recovery usb drive.

thanks alot

Ian

 

Hey there

In my case the 80gb msata ssd wasn't configured as a cache drive for some reason. Had to take care of this myself. I won't bother you with the details as yours might be properly set up. If not, I'll be happy to help with that.

Regarding the new SSD I purchased, after installing it in the available slot in the laptop, I accessed my BIOS and set the boot order as : 1- DVD drive, 2- New SSD, etc...
I put in the Windows 8.1 disk and installed it normally on the new SSD and upon restarting it loaded properly into Windows 8. I took the files I needed from the the 1Tb drive and then formatted it.
It's extremely simple to access the hard-drive bay but in case you have any doubts, there are plenty of Youtube videos showing how to do that.

That's all! Very easy to do. Just let me know if you need anything else and good luck!

P.S: I recommend you also set the mode of all drives as "RAID". I am at work and can't tell you where this is exactly but should be easy enough to google.

 

Hi, everything Nick says, +rep.

The drives should be in RAID already (hopefully) so nothing to get involved with. If you see a text screen with drive configuration before the bios load screen then it is all set up and ready to go.

If you see more than one drive in explorer then the cache may not be set up.

Hope you enjoy your new machine and it IS set up correctly

 

Thanks Guys,

Rep added for both...

should find out this Friday when the laptop arrives, i may have to create a usb recovery stick, from memory i wont get a bootable win disk with a refurb machine its usually on a partition somewhere on the internal hdd.

This might be a bit trickier to sort, from memory when i last did this with my last alienware laptop refurb the usb recovery stick i created would not work due to the mismatch in size from the current drive to the new ssd drive i want to put it on.

fingers crossed, i will post my findings over the weekend when i get chance to have a play.

Thanks alot

ian

 

Np, good luck and thanks.

For the USB image, Respawn will want a drive the same size or larger to create the same partitions. It's DR really and not for a hardware swap. Most SSD's come with an imaging utility that can resize partitions, or back in the day I would use PartitionMagic or Norton Ghost to move whole OS's to a new drive. Just ignore any advice it gives about changing the drive access type and it will work just fine.

Good luck

 

I got my laptop refurbished as well but did get a bootable recovery CD (with Win7). If you don't get one, then it's definitely a great idea to prepare one!

 

Hi,

After a painfull weekend with my new aw17 with the not so good gtx 880m... And now thinking its time to do something positive and turn my disappointment to installing her SSD drive into my laptop.

I have from the images two drives, a 1tb HDD and an 80gb sata SSD.

I'm not sure it's been set up properly but it does but into windows in around 15 secs. What I would like to do is have the sata ssd caching the 1tb drive and make the 256gb ssd as my boot drive with a clone of my already installed wins 8.1 os.

If anyone can help I would be very grateful

Thanks

Ian

 

That is a strange setup and not one I've seen dell use! The boot drive IS the HDD but part of the SSD has been allocated to a separate drive and only 22gb to caching.

AFAIK Dell setup the maximum size cache (64gb) on an 80 Gb msata drive and the remainder is unformatted, but it may have changed?

To keep the caching and put in a new boot SSD you need to do the following:

Put the new drive in the spare bay and go into the bios. Change the boot order.

Restart with either your bootable USB or windows CD in the drive and use F12 to boot from the device.

Install your image or fresh windows to the new drive.

When finished the original drive will (probably) become D: and contain the original install. Once you are happy with your new installation you can format the old drive. One gotcha though is the 'spare' SSD space currently showing up as D:. Might be an E: as well when finished?

I'd be inclined to fix that before installing the new drive.

You will need to go into disk manager and delete the 53 gb partition so it shows as free. You should then be able to go into IRST and change the cache size to the maximum. If you put the new drive in at this point it will be less confusing as you can decide later if you want the 20gb or so available on the cache drive to be used.

This might help: Chipset Software — Intel® Smart Response Technology User Guide Ignore the bios stuff, it is already all setup .

Cloning is not looking good for this setup but it may work fine so give it a try. It's a no risk option since changing the boot order leaves all your original installation to roll back to if needed .

Good luck.

 

hi mate

thanks alot, i will give it a go... my aw17 is currently in the hand of a tech replacing my 880m for a 780m... thats another story on that one...

im hoping i will be able clone to an ssd or use alienrespawn to copy the factory image onto the new ssd, i've only had the laptop for about 4 days and there's nothing on it im worried about losing.

will post later once ive tried to install the ssd

Thanks alot, rep given

Ian

 

And appreciated - thanks.

Oh dear, the 880m is turning into it's own horror story . I've been reading a lot of issues and it seems that it is a chip too far?

680m = gold standard Kepler, runs cool and easily overclocked to 780 base performance.
780m = 680m but uses that spare capacity to give better performance - kinda a pre-overclocked 680m.
880m = Trying to squeeze the last drop of performance from an 'old' GK104 core - and apparently not working too well.

Good luck. PM if you get stuck .

 

hi mate

your not kidding, the 880m is a rebrand to far from Nvidia... my journey started at the 680m, and that was a brilliant chipset. never had a problem and frame rate where consistent and very smooth.

next was the 780m with a 120hz screen, loved it and again another great product from nvidia.

i then (stupidly) sold the aw17 with 120hz screen and got aw17 with 880m, biggest mistake ever.... not only was it the worst gpu i have ever owned, but i lost the 120hz screen as well, and now that is my biggest regret...

never mind the engineer has just left after replacing my 880m with a 780m so all should be good once i get home and load the drivers and test it out... im going to keep my eye open for a 120hz screen for it or i might buy a monitor that can go upto 144hz and us the internal screen for when im travelling probably cheaper.... fingers crossed..

will let you know about the ssd install

thanks once again

Ian

 

I feel for you man, I'd be spitting bullets right now! This may help with the panel if you are looking to upgrade it - http://forum.notebookreview.com/alienware-17-m17x/744470-aw17-120hz-screen.html

I couldn't go back from the 120hz display and now the mobile GPU's are powerful enough to cope with 3D it's an extension to my gameplay I'm not prepared to give up - "From my cold dead hands" is the quote that comes to mind .

 

Hi,

Tonight has been a disaster, got the 780m installed today and it was all good.... So I decided to clone my harddrive onto a samsung pro 256 gb ssd, using the software that came with the ssd.

The cloning process complete 100%, so I rebooted and selected the ssd from the boot menu. Seem to boot up fine so I formatted the hdd drive. From that point on it all went horribly wrong.

My aw17 now won't boot at all well it boots to a blue login screen and then says preparing windows and noth happens.

I don't have a recovery image, as there wasn't one on the factory harddrive and I now don't know what to do...

I think I need to call Alienware tomorrow and see if they can send me a windows disc or offer me a link to download an ISO from the only problem is I don't have a cd key to activate it.

From memory before it crash just after I formatted the hdd drive, the raid was still running and the new ssd was now the F drive!!!!

Not sure if I can recover this without a window 8.1 disk... I haven't lost any important data so I'm not bothered it's just that I have spent all night doing it and not achieved anything...

Going to bed now as it's 1:20am, knackered

Any advice is always welcome

Thanks in advance

Ian

 

Oh dear, not sure what happened there. Did you change the boot order in the BIOS? I have seen windows crash when hidden boot files are on a different drive to the OS install. Happened to me once when I set my SSD as the 'active primary' drive, changing it from my data drive. My machine was working fine until a reboot when it failed.

The fix was to run the windows repair from the CD - twice. Microsoft now publish ISO's and even a tool to create a bootable USB so a little searching of MS should find it. As I understand it the licence is somehow hardware embedded so you should not need it.

Images do not like hardware changes and the fact that when you started it the drive letters were messed up is something I thought might happen, and why I said I would 'fix' the cache drive and get rid of the spare drive before cloning. Hey-ho we'll get there . As you said there was no factory partition then this machine definitely has been rebuilt by someone other than dell so a fresh install is going to be the best way forward anyway

make sure the NEW SSD is first in the BIOS boot order (and never physically swap drive positions!) and start from the win cd to try the repair, before a fresh install.

Good luck.

 

cheers mate

spoke to alienware and they are send me out today a windows 8 dvd.

should be back up and running hopefully in the next couple of days

Thanks for the help

Ian

 

No prob, glad to hear dell are being helpful. You hear so many excuses to avoid providing support from other OEM's. This AW is the first consumer computer that gives you business level support I have come across - and I don't mind paying a premium for that.

Hopefully AW have finally created their own Win8 dvd so you get the full AW experience and not a vanila install? Just one thing I would do before going down a full reinstall path, and that would be to make sure you default the BIOS - just to avoid any future issues. There is a possibility the win8 options have been changed if the machine was re-installed. These can cause horrible install problems .


Rooting for you

 

Hi,

Just an update, and a bit of help needed...

the disc set arrived from Dell this morning, unfortunately its the windows 8.1 vanilla version. A bit disappointed because i wanted all the alienware stuff etc... never mind im just grateful they sent me the discs...

so i have now repaired the drive using the win dvd and its repaired the drive I cloned, samsung pro 256gb ssd... its booting into windows very fast now. next job is to insert the resource disc they sent me for all the hardware drivers to be installed which i plan to do tonight.

one question i have at the moment the raid is not working on my original 1tb windows boot drive that is now formatted but it still has a number of small partitions on it. i will need to install the intel smart response software... what do i do then... I just want to make sure i do it right this time...

Thanks in advance

Ian