New Alienware owner saying Hi! and a couple of questions....

Hi guys (and girls)

I've been on here for about a year reading up, but not posting; so I am crawling out of the woodwork now...

Having owned a Dell Precision M6400 for a few years I decided it was time to update my tech and after considering a few alternatives from the M6800 to a Clevo-based laptop I decided to go for the Alienware 17; I've gone for a fairly simple spec with a view to add a few bits over time - it's got the Haswell i7-4700MQ CPU and GTX770M graphics with 16GB ram. I opted for Windows 7 over 8 because at 55 years old I can't be bothered to start learning how to use a PC all over again; my wife has a MacBook Air and it's a mystery to me.....

The nice people from UPS should arrive with the 'product' tomorrow

The HDD is a standard 750gb 7200 drive, and I'll be transplanting the 256gb SSD currently in my Precision as a first step, and I have a couple of other options I am looking at.

I also have a hybrid 750gb Seagate that I am considering as a replacement for the standard 750gb as a stopgap until I buy a 512gb SSD which will become the primary drive. I am also looking at adding a mSATA drive too

What I'd like to know is what you think of the options above, and what benefits I'd see from an mSATA card; I've never had one before and I did find the Intel TurboBoost thing a bit underwhelming, I mainly play Flight Simulator, Train Simulator 2014 and FIFA14 so nothing over taxing graphically; my hope is for a short boot time, and stutter-free simming with all sliders firmly to Maximum.

I know this is pretty simple noobish stuff, but be gentle with me! I'm an old beardy bloke with zero knowledge about this latest raft of tech, and you never know, one day you might need my advice on how to set the tappets on a Morris Minor using only a block of cheddar and a small piece of tweed.....

Thanks for your input in advance

Trabant Dave

 

Using the SSD for the system files and for the software that you use most frequently will have the largest impact on performance. Swapping an HDD for a hybrid for the 2nd drive probably won't have any significant improvement in performance.

The benefit of using an mSATA SSD on the motherboard is that it frees up an HDD slot - so you can have three drives instead of two. I have an SSD on the motherboard for my system/software files, an HDD for large data files (media), and a second HDD that I use to keep backups of the SSD.

 

welcome to NBR dude!! The 770m should be able to easily handle all those games as far as I know. an mSATA drive is pretty much just an SSD shrunk down to save space in the laptop and is really nice if you wanna run regular hard drives in RAID.

 

Only difference is mSATA SSDs are less common than traditional 2.5" SSDs and I don't believe mSATA goes up to the sizes of 2.5" SSDs (for obvious reasons).

 

Welcome to NBR, Dave. You've got a nice machine there. The others beat me to it, so best of luck.

In my opinion, mSATA SSD's will become quite common among mobile devices within the next two years or so, even as primary drives. Everything is going smaller and mSATA's are tiny suckers.

Can't wait until Samsung releases their 1TB mSATA!

 

Thanks for the advice guys; I think based on your input I'll use my 256gb SSD as primary, buy an mSATA 512gb card for my regularly used programs and keep the stock 750gb drive as storage for films, music etc - I also have a USB3 2tb external drive to archive to so I don't think I'll be running out of space anytime soon....

Just need the UPS man to arrive and I am good to go!

Cheers for the warm welcome and pointing me in the right direction

Dave

 

The mSata can also be used as a cache device for the storage drive so that transfer and load speeds increase.

 

Well I collected my Alien from UPS after work on Thursday and Friday was THE longest day ever at work; I've spent the weekend sorting out the drives and now have the OS on my Samsung 840 Pro 256gb, and the Railworks install on its own Crucial 256gb mSATA with room to grow (currently at 128gb of choo-choo heaven; sad huh?) and all else on the 750gb Seagate hybrid; I've hooked out the standard WD black and put it into stasis in case it's needed in a hurry; the Dell Precision M6400 will be getting a 500gb 7200 Seagate that was kicking about, and after a hard weekends fettling I just have a few 'must haves' left to install; the FlightSim stuff will have to wait until next weekend.

Just wanted to say that the performance is stunning and the aesthetics not too shabby either; having checked FPS on the M6400 and the same scenario on the Alienware, the rate is almost trebled with higher 'prettiness' settings - I'll be tweaking and playing this coming week.

So far I am very impressed and looking forward to having a good work-out in the coming days/weeks/months; thanks again to all who offered advice!

Dave

 

Hi there have a look at this lil guy.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/B00HFD9CM2/ref=redir_mdp_mobile?redirect=true

sent from GT-I9606

 

If your still looking for this drive, I bought it from Newegg and it is awesome...Very good investment if you can afford it...

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-MTE1T0BW 1TB mSATA III TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)