My experience adding an SSD to an M17x R4

I see a lot of questions here from people wanting to add an SSD to their M17x, so I thought it might be helpful if I shared my experience while the experience is fresh in my mind. Thanks to Micky1234 and others who helped me in the process.

My situation: brand new M17x R4 that came with a 750 GB HDD and a 64 GB SSD mSATA that was supposed to be set up as a cache drive. Turns out it was NOT set up that way - I was able to see the mSATA drive in Explorer and the Intel IRST program did not show the Accelerate button on the top row, so I had to fix that - but that's another thread.

So I wanted to keep the 750 GB HDD+ 64 GB SSD mSATA cache drive for data and file storage, and used the new SSD for the OS and programs. System came with Windows 7 installed on the HDD.

I chose a Samsung 512 GB 840 Pro SSD to add to the system. So step 1 was to install the new SSD and then install Windows 7 onto it.

Before installing the new SSD, I booted up the system and went into the BIOS and changed the boot order so that the new SSD drive was the boot drive. I then shut down the system.

I removed the HDD from the system just to make sure I didn't accidentally install Windows on the wrong drive, or accidentally format the wrong drive. I would eventually format the HDD, but I wanted to leave it alone to start with. That way, if I somehow screwed up the install of the SSD, I could simply put the HDD back in and change the boot order back to making the HDD the boot drive and I'd be back up and running.

So - HDD came out (BTW - be careful pulling that plastic tab, my HDD was in pretty firm and I broke the plastic pull tab off trying to remove the HDD!) 840 Pro went into the empty caddy and slot (no adapters, etc. needed - it is very simple to install.) Everything back together, Windows 7 disc that came with the system in the DVD drive and turned on the system. Hit F12 as it started up and chose boot from the DVD option. It then booted from the Windows 7 disc, and I did a clean install (NOT the repair install.)

There is a format/partition option. You want to use NFTS, and I created a partition that was only 75% of the 512 GB due to a lot of discussion on "Overprovisioning" (see the SSD sub forum on this website) that states that leaving part of the SSD unused allows the SSD to run faster longer. Set that up following the instructions on screen, then let it install Windows 7. Which it did very quickly and then walked me through the initial Windows setup.

Restart, and since I'd set up the BIOS to boot from the new drive as the boot drive (the F12 option is a one time boot option so it didn't boot from the DVD drive this time) it booted right up into Windows 7 from the SSD. I had not put the HDD back in, because I wanted to make sure it actually was booting up from Windows on the SSD. It did boot from Windows 7 on the SSD so I turned it back off, and put the HDD back in.

Restarted and again it booted up (very quickly!) into Windows 7 from the SSD. Be aware, however, that none of the hardware drivers are installed with the fresh Windows 7 install and you now need to install them. Here is a useful guide for that:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...er-install-order-guide-alienware-systems.html

There are two approaches you can take here. You have the Alienware resource disc that came with your system. It comes with most of the drivers (maybe all of them.) I saw some things on it that made me wonder if the drivers were the most recent, so I went with route 2: Go to the Dell website, enter your Service Tag number from your M17x, and it will show you all the drivers for your specific machine (e.g. it will only show the 680M video driver for the video driver rather than the AMD and nVidea drivers.)

NOTE: your wireless driver will not be installed on your system after the fresh Windows install, so you won't be able to go directly to the website on your M17x until you install the wireless driver! So - what i did was use my old M1710 laptop to download the drivers, then put them on a USB flash stick, put that in the M17x (the USB ports work fine even though you haven't yet installed any USB drivers) and installed the drivers from there. So approaches you can take for this step:

1. Before you install the SSD, go to the Dell site and download all of the drivers into a folder on your HDD. Then after you install the SSD, you can simply go to your HDD (assuming you still have it and are not replacing it!) and install the drivers from there.
2. You can do what I did and download the drivers from the Dell site on another computer and use something like a flash drive to move them to your M17x and install them from there.
3. You can install just the wireless driver first (via either of these methods) then simply go to the Dell site and download and install them directly onto your system.
4, Simply put the Alienware resource disc in the drive and run the program it has on there and install from that disc.

I don't think any of these approaches is "wrong" and I only can attest to the approach I took.

Oh - one other note - I installed the touchpad driver immediately, ignoring the order given in the guide I linked. The reason: the touchpad was EXTREMELY jumpy and almost unusable until I installed the Synaptics driver which made doing anything on the M17x almost un-doable.

Anyway - I followed the general order in the Guide linked above. I was a little confused by some things and it appears you don't have to worry about installing in that exact order - I misread a couple of items and installed them "out of order" and it didn't appear to make a difference. Also - do make sure to turn off the auto-update option for Windows before doing all of this, you don't want Windows updating until after you are done (but be sure and turn on the Windows updates when done!)

I did have a problem installing the Alienware Command Center from the Dell site. I ended up installing that from the Resource disc, and then it updated after being installed. It appears that there was a need for some Windows .net file updates that was the problem, but bottom line it installed just fine from the disc and then updated later to the newest version.

After installing all of the drivers, everything ran great! And oh my gosh fast!

On the whole question of RAID, etc. - my system came with RAID 0 set up due to the use of the cache drive with the HDD. I just left it alone and didn't mess with it and everything was fine. Unless you are setting up some kind of multi-disc array I don't think you have to worry about it.

OK - I probably left something out and I am NOT an expert, but hopefully that will answer some questions for people installing a new SSD and the OS on that new SSD.

Cheers and good luck!

 

Thank you so much for posting your experience and steps. I recently ordered the Samsung 840 pro 256GB and was wondering how I would install it, but you pretty much answered all the questions I had.

 

Thanks for sharing +1Rep!

 

Thanks for the thanks guys, everything I learned on how to do it came from others here, so just trying to pass it along!

 

nice work dude!! hope you can clear my doubt about an msata too. so my m17x is scheduled to come by the end of the month from costco, and it will have the stock 2x500 GB RAID 0 configuration, which will give me adequate storage room of 1TB. I wanted to install an additional 128 or 120 GB msata drive to use as the boot drive, without disturbing the RAID 0 configuration. Now I know its much more complicated than your situation here, but I was wondering if I could take apart the two RAID 0 drives like you did here, change the boot option, install the OS on the msata drive, and finally put back the HDD drives. Would it then run like normal, like an msata boot drive and RAID 0 storage drives, if I make the SSD my primary boot drive??

I hope I made myself clear.

 

I have the M17x R3 and just recently ordered the Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD. It should get here Monday and I've been doing a lot of research on the subject. I just want to clarify a few things:

1. I'm using the modded A12 BIOS because SATA III was disabled with A08.
2. I currently have 2 320GB 7200 RPM HDDs installed in RAID 0
3. I've read that SATA III in HDD bay 0 can be inconsistent and that I should install the SSD in bay 1. Can anyone confirm this?
4. I plan on using the SSD as my boot/primary drive and one of the 320 HDDs as a storage drive.

I'm under the understanding that I should boot into the BIOS, switch to AHCI, power the laptop down, remove both HDDs and install the SSD in bay 1, boot from the Win 8 install disc and preform a fresh installation, and then install the HDD and format it later.

Am I right?

 

Hi, That will work just fine without too much effort. The RAID drives are configured in a RAID BIOS and as far as the operating system is concerned they will appear as a single drive so leave them alone. As long as you do not make any bios changes other then the boot order you just install the SSD, set boot order, boot from DVD and install - make sure you are using the AW windows disk so that it uses the correct Intel disk driver.

That works for the R3, as long as you don't intend to use caching or raid in the future (without a full re-install) then going AHCI is OK.

My R3 operated the AW supplied SSD at sata III OK in slot 0 but I've seen many only getting the speed by swapping them over (and using a modified bios or pre A08)- simple task. You can leave one HDD in as it won't effect the install, and if because it was part of a RAID drive it needs formatting then the windows install can take care of it, but doing it after the install is a valid option

HTH

 

+1 for the 840 Pro. I can't wait to make the jump from a HDD to the top preforming SSD on the market. Hello < 10 second boot times

With as fast as the 840 Pro is I can't see why i'd need to set up a RAID. Having the SSD as the boot drive and a secondary storage drive (might upgrade in the future if 320GB isn't enough space) works perfectly for me.

I think i'm going to be safe and just install the SSD in bay 1 from the start. Thanks for confirming I had the steps right though.

 

Yup, since you only have 2 drive bays the only time you might need the RAID bios to be loaded is if you decided to get another SSD and put both drives in a RAID array. This would not need anything other than installing it and then going into the IRST software and combining the drives, but that option requires that you install windows in RAID mode even if you are not using it.
My RAID bios reports 'no raid drives' at startup and any overhead is so small that only benchmarking will show it so I leave it just in case I want it - I might add an msata SSD cache drive for my HDD at some point

 

So I should simply open up the laptop and simply install the msata inside. After that install Windows to the msata, and change the boot order. Its that simple right?? thanks. Thats gonna reduce the bootup time by an extent, dont you think??

I'm afraid I dont know anything about the alienware windows disk, and I dont know anything about costco senting me any. What if I'm using an ordinary windows installation disk?? Isn't there another way if i dont get the above said dvd by chance??

 

Yes you've got it Should get around 10-15 sec load time

As for the windows disk (and I'm talking win 7) if you don't have it then windows uses a compatibility mode disk driver and this causes a BSOD at the end of the install. What you have to do is get the intel drivers onto a USB drive (they are inside the IRST download at dell - expand this) then at the disk config screen press the key to load a different disk driver, point it at the USB drive and it should then say something like 'Intel RAID SATA'. You can then continue the install.

Have no idea if win 8 works out-of-the-box?

Good Luck!

 

I believe this is relevant. It explains what drivers you need and how to get them:

Alienware Systems: Windows 7 cannot finish the installation

 

Guide with updated drivers http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...dows-8-clean-install-drivers.html#post9065543

 

So should I only format the SSD to 75% capacity as stated in the OP? What about when I get Windows 8 installed and the Magician software wants me to set aside another 10% for overprovising? On top of that you're not supposed to completely fill up an SSD so I should always have atleast 10% of the drive free. 25% + 10% + 10% of not used space = only being able to use 55% of the drive for storage. That doesn't sound right to me...

 

Am I missing something?

 

There is some debate on the whole overprovisioning (leaving free space) issue, but I think if you simply format the drive to only 75% of the capacity, you can then just use it as normal. Once you've done that, you've taken care of the issue and can ignore the "don't fill the SSD" rules - you won't fill it, you've taken care of that with formatting it at 75%. At least, that's my understanding, and so far it is running very well.

 

I got the Samsung 840 pro 500GB drive, installed it, used alien respawn to recreate factory settings. My question is regarding the raid settings and the mechanical 750GB drive+32GB mSATA set up in raid I already had in the machine. If I boot on the Samsung SSD and run the Magician software supplied with it, it states that the system should be set up for AHCI, not raid. But I still want my old drive and the mSATA to run in raid. I cant figure out what to do. Leaving it in raid seems to work, but the software still warns me that its not optimal and theres a few settings I cant use. Can I change / configure AHCI for just the Samsung SSD? Thanks

 

I'd say ignore the warning. You will loose the cache in AHCI and the overhead is minimal. If it works then you are good.

 

Some ssds can be filled without worry of course.

 

Hi guys,

First post so go easy.

Got my 250gb Samsung 840 pro today. Had a 500gb 7200rpm Hitachi or whatever the hell the stock HDD was and it took me an hour to swap it out, booting from the SSD.

Here is my steps...

1. Turned power off, took battery out and inserted the SSD into the HDD 1 caddy (HDD 0 being taken up by the Hitachi)

2. Turned computer on and booted where it proceeded to install the drivers for the SSD (I took note that it DID NOT appear under "My computer" and this should be right considering it hasn't even been formatted. It did, however, appear under "Manage" -> "Disk Management" and asked me a question {irrelevant at this stage})

3. Played with making an image of my HDD as a back up, after I'd copied all my media files to an external HDD but due to unforeseen circumstances (a short in a USB hub after trying to plug in a multi adapter to power my IPOD and phone UPSIDE DOWN rebooted the with 2% to go) I decided to jump into using the Samsung Data Migration software which came on a cd WITH the SSD.

4. The software cloned my 500gb HDD to the 250GB SSD and took 40 mins. I then swapped the caddy's around so the SSD was in the HDD 0 slot and the Hitachi was in the HDD 1 slot.
Booted up without a hitch.

5. Loaded Samsung Magician which ALSO comes on the CD and lo and behold it told me to go into my bios and mark it as AHCI instead of RAID (Why RAID when you don't need to?)

6. Rebooted again and played with Samsung Magician some more to optimize it for maximum performance. It tells you how much to keep in reserve of the SSD but it IS optional) Booted up again.

7. Changed my Libraries so downloads and videos and game saves in "My Documents" are located in my new E: (old HDD). Had to delete old Windows (did a format because deleting wouldn't work, and was a pleasant suprise because Samsung Data Migration told me it would delete the old windows but it didn't. It also didn't delete my recovery partition so it's floating around on my old HDD in case I need to BIOS Boot into it).

Summary:

Anyone who tells you to do a "fresh install" is kidding themselves and is being old school. Sure you can do it that way...and spend days installing all your drivers, finding they don't work cos you didn't do it in the proper "sequence" and then reinstalling your old programs and games and bleh and bleh and bleh....

Or you can spend 40 mins having the same setup except all your media is on your "old" drive in the second bay.

If your like me you fill your hard drive up pretty quick so all my programs and a few games are on the SSD. Redirecting Downloads from Utorrent and Firefox and such was a cinch and re-locating the libraries took 2 mins. I then dumped all my media back into those folders.

DO NOT just copy your "Users" folder over because this will mess with your other programs and app data and such. If you look hard enough there is a easy method to that rather than messing with links and registry setting's but just re-locating libraries is a hell of a lot easier. My game saves looked in my Library folder for "E:/My documents" -> "Game Saves" automatically.

This is THE method I suggest with a Samsung 840 PRO because they've looked after us people who went the extra mile to get the best SSD out there

Cheers guys and If I offended anyone it wasn't intentional. This was 2 months research because I was so worried about the whole cloning thing because I have a lot of to re-install I knew there had to be an easier way.

I do not suggest it with any other SSD though I would be game to give cloning a go next time with 3rd party software because it was very easy. It's the optimisation that the Samsung software does that is the difference otherwise you have to turn off all the hibernation and cacheing settings and what not because SSD'd don't need em....Samsung does it for you

 

Great to hear your experiences. I always say, as long as you do not change anything in the BIOS (except the boot order if you use the spare slot) then imaging is quick, simple, and usually works just fine . If not then you're into a clean install.

Plenty of free 3rd party imaging software around - even Respawn can be used for this

 

Yuh agreed.

Though the Samsung software told me to change to AHCI "after" it had booted up with the OS, but before that I did not touch the BIOS while doing the cloning with the SSD in the HDD 1 slot. It worked both ways fine... though I had been timing my boot up's through Soluto and it did knock off 6 secs to the boot after I changed from RAID to AHCI.

The only problem I foresee with 3rd party software cloning is that some people won't be aware that SSD's are different to HDD's and you need some tweaks done to Windows afterwards. The good thing about Samsung Magician is that it's a one click press and a restart and WHAM! Windows gets tweaked like you'd done a fresh install straight to the SSD.

Maybe other SSD's have similar software but I do know there are a few guides to "what to do after upgrading to a SSD"

Cheers

 

I think you got lucky with changing to AHCI. The default installation of having the RAID BIOS active means windows is using a different disk driver. If the image is using RAID drivers then often it will BSOD on first startup. Maybe it's going the other way is where it falls down?

A simple method for imaging is to use respawn to create an emergency USB then boot from that to put it onto the new drive. That software you used may be doing something more clever though. I've yet to see anything that shows that a fresh install onto an SSD is any better due to some sort of optimisation, windows figures it out

 

I understand where your coming from, however the AHCI setting in the BIOS is the most common used if your not running 2 SSD's in a RAID array. I would say Alienware lappies keeps it as the default from the start so it makes it easier to chuck in a similar sized HDD and get it going as a RAID array of some sort immediately. Everything I've read suggests that if you go with an 1 SSD and 1 normal HDD then you should change it to AHCI because otherwise it won't detect the SSD properly.

That being said...Initially when I first put my SSD into the 2nd bay to start cloning it, I got a menu on start-up before windows loaded that I hadn't seen before showing the 2 drive's and asking me to press ctrl-i for configuration. I imagine this is where the BIOS is asking what sort of RAID array I want the two drives in. I ignored that screen and went straight into windows and started cloning the drives.

After I swapped them, I noticed I was still getting that screen asking me about the drives on start-up. I went into Samsung Magician and it told me to change to AHCI otherwise the SSD won't perform how it should. I restarted, changed from RAID to AHCI in the BIOS and rebooted. Now it boots up how it should with the Klipsch alienware art instead of the hard drive configuration screen.

And yeh....I thought there would be no problem with Windows just detecting the SSD and doing what it needs to but according to this Upgrading to an SSD - Alienware User Support you need to to do stuff like disable indexing and the pagefile and what-not. However the software that comes with the Samsung does it all for you.

Hope that makes what I'm saying a bit clearer.

Cheers

 

Yup a lot of advice around, and much of it IMO not needed any more with the latest kit. I've done 20 years in PC/Network support so know my way around a PC pretty well. Also been setting up RAID arrays on servers since 1997. All the AHCI/RAID stuff I see here is often just what you used to have to do. I have my RAID active with one SSD and one HD running in non-raid mode and it all works just fine. Only in benchmarks can I see a difference in speed of access using AHCI. The overhead is so small it is unnoticeable in use. It also gives me the option of adding a cache drive later to speed up the HD and it will be plug-n-go. If I had windows in AHCI either a reinstall of windows or some tricky registry work would be needed.

The hard drive configuration screen you mention is the RAID BIOS screen as you identified, so that drives can be configured before the OS boots, so turning it off does give you an extra couple of seconds off load time at boot.

As for pagefile and indexing, that's more about getting the best benchmark numbers and does not effect real world use. indexing on an SSD is going to be way faster than a HD anyway, and I always disable the pagefile since I'm only running single apps and 8Gb of ram is plenty for me.

There are many, many way's of doing these things but I stick to what I have done (successfully) and advise on that basis . That document is generic and is aimed at getting the absolute best speeds (benchmark numbers) possible. Way more than your average user would need to do. As I said a 'normal' user would never notice the difference.

Main point though is you have it all working so however you went about it, it was a success

 

Lol we have Alienware. We aren't "average" :thumbsup:

 

Ha ha so true, and why we all want our machines to be as fast as possible - even if it's just to say 'I got xxxxx in my disk speedtest '

Never seen a mainstream OEM give out a user manual that takes you through almost a complete strip down so dell are still catering to the 'original' AW market. How long that will last with their drive for global dominance and the blandness (IMO) of the latest models we shall see. Waiting to see if the new models contain any marketing materials (freebies). It used to be; a hat, large padded alienhead sticker (perfect for a phone), mouse mat, and an SP/Dif adaptor. By the R4 this was just a mouse mat. Silly stuff but it just makes you feel you are getting a quality, exclusive, product. /soapbox_off.

I was thinking about the advice you were given by the SSD OEM. It is aimed purely at getting best possible speeds without reference to any machine specific compromises you may be making. What's the first thing many new SSD users do?. Run a benchmark. If the numbers are less than the competition then they loose market on that product.

If you wanted to add another SSD later on, and then RAID them so you have a single logical drive it's almost certain windows will need reinstalling after switching on the RAID bios

If you ever update the BIOS remember that it will reset to default causing windows to BSOD if you do not go into it and set the drive access method back to your selection

 

Thanks for sharing

 

I am thinking serious about ordering one in fact thats also how I found this thread...I will come back and read when i get to that point. Thanks for the help.

 

An alienware or an SSD?

 

I bought Alienware on Ebay waiting for it now it has the following already but I want to max this puppy out with Storage within reason...

Processor: Intel i7 3820qm @ 2.7GHz boost to 3.7 GHz
Graphics: Nvidea GTX 675M
Storage: 2x 256GB SSDs in RAID 0 for 512GB
RAM: 32GB DDR3 1600MHz
Screen: 1920x1080 60HZ