New M17r3 upgrading

Just received my new computer. Unfortunately I am now out of town with family and cannot play with it. I ordered with one SSD. I know this is not enough space. I also ordered with only 4g memory. A couple of questions.

1. Do the m17's support 1866 memory? I have the 2820.

2. Been reading the horrible stories of try to change off of RAID.
If I clone the drive to a better SSD first then plug a second in will I be able to maintain the raid setting but add up to two disks to increase storage? I would like to see around 500 Gb space. Or is it going to be easier to just do a full re install of windows? Up grade the SSD and add a second 7200 for data?
I am not opposed to ordering two better SSD. I sure that someone will want the stock SSD.

Thanks for you help.

Rob

 

1. Yes; whether it's worth the cost is another matter. The issue is thoroughly reviewed here: AnandTech - Sandy Bridge Memory Scaling: Choosing the Best DDR3. The short version -- if you're going to swap memory anyway, i.e., to go from 4GB to 8GB, then the relatively small increased cost of DDR3-1600 is probably justified, but the substantial additional cost of DDR3-1866 memory yields almost no marginal improvement in performance and should be avoided except for bragging purposes. Otherwise, DDR3-1333 will still serve you well.

2. You have many options. Easiest is probably to leave the existing SSD in place and add a HDD of 500GB or more. The R3 only accommodates 2 drives as delivered. You can replace the CD/DVD/BR drive with another disk drive, but it is rarely necessary given that you can use a USB 3.0 or eSata external as needed. If you upgrade the SSD to a faster/bigger/better SSD as the OS drive, it is best to do clean install of Windows on the new SSD. However, you may be pleasantly surprised by the speed of the stock SSD and find that no upgrade is needed, at least immediately.

Enjoy your new R3. Sounds like a beast.

 

Thanks for the link on the memory!


2. But just adding in a HDD requires changing the bios from RAID to ACHI,
no? Then requires re installing everything?

 

i have 2 seperate drives and use raid mode with no problems

 

You can use either. When I installed my SSD, I switched to AHCI because most SSD boards recommend it for optimal SSD performance. I assumed I would have to reformat the original HDD that came with Win 7 installed using Raid as the SATA mode, but that turned out to be unnecessary. I have no problem reading or writing to or from the original HDD, plus I have a backup bootable disk drive if needed. But people use Raid mode (without Raid arrays) for multiple drives successfully. Your choice.

 

No, not really. Both Shinob! and I have issues with the 1866 memory where Windows runs fine with the 1866 and even recognizes it as that, but sleep/resume and/or restart/shutdown fails using 1866 (laptop shuts off immediately coming out of sleep or won't shut down at all where all the lights just stay on). If you buy 1866 memory, you'll more than likely end up running it at 1600 MHz, although I haven't tested the 1866 memory in my new upgrade R3, but I will. It's possible it's just Shinob! and I that have problems or so-called isolated cases.

Just trying to save you the headache of thinking you have serious hardware-related issues when it's the memory speed causing it.

 

2. I use AHCI with no problems. The switch is easy but you have to reinstall windows 7 after changing setting in Bios. The only reason I choose AHCI is I read Intel SSD's work best that way.

Over a month in with no problems with either hard drives.