New Alienware 17 owner - did I jump the gun?

Hi peoples, I purchased my laptop last friday and is in the mail at the moment.

4900mq, 780m, 3d panel 32gb ram, 256gb msata and 750gb hdd. All this for 3350 aussie dollars. On dell website they wanted 4600 for the same setup. I didn't realize the 880m was so near release but it doesn't matter because I choose alienware so I could upgrade to the 980m in the future. Hopefully its compatible.

Anyways I bought a 1tb samsung evo ssd. Should I replace the hdd or is there a spare hdd/ssd slot? Can I buy a second 1tb ssd and raid them? What raid would best suit?

Cheers

 

Hi there, welcome aboard (almost!)

A lot depends on what you want to use it for but the latest cards can destroy most any game cranked up so you're going to be good for quite a while (IMO). Basic rule with these things for GPU upgrades is 'if dell sell it during a model run then you will get a bios update to support it'. Otherwise there are always people here that figure out the best way to make them work .

The disk thing is the same, what do you want to do with it? You have two primary drive slots as well as the msata. With your OS already on the msata and one drive bay spare you could use some of it (new SSD) to cache the HDD and the rest as a fast storage drive? Removing the HDD and RAID two SSD's is an option as well if you want.

Are you looking for speed or safety or just ease-of-management of a single drive letter?

 

On my desktop I run a 256gb ssd for win7 and 512gb ssd for steam games and 4tb hdd for storage. Is the 256gb msata fine for windows and maybe 1tb for games and other stuff. Whats the biggest hdd I can fit. Will there be noticeable speed increases with 2 ssds?

 

Well the 256 ssd is fine so it's down to a nice big, fast, storage? You already manage your games on another drive so that's no problem. You could just add another two 1tb SSD's and raid them to a single 2tb drive. It will be slightly slower in benchmarks but you'll never see it in use.

Depends on what you need though, I'm using a 1tb games drive and with 25+ games and a few ISO's I'm still OK for a few more

 

I agree with MickyD1234, and here's a video from our support site to remove and replace the HDD in the Alienware 17, in case you need a guide. Good luck!

 

Only one 1tb ssd has arrived so far so I installed it yesterday pretty easy. Ive gone through and re downloaded all my my games with stesm and origin. Loving metro 2033 in 3d and grid looks nice. Only issue ive had so far is getting arma 3 to play at full screen and not disapear after the first few load screens. Window mode works but I hate it.

 

Good to hear .

That 3D is a real surprise for a lot of people, get it for the 120hz display and discover this is in a different league to 3D TV . Get a cheap copy of portal for the full experience . TR is pretty cool as well.

That prob with Arma has been reported by a few people on the driver forum and if it bugs you earlier releases seem to be OK.