mSATA drive bay

Hey everyone,

I received my m17x R4 yesterday from FedEx. It is beautiful. I opted for the regular HDD because i will upgrade it myself in the future. Which leaves me with one question...

Where is the mSATA drive bay located in the laptop?

I have looked through the online owners manual but all I can see is the 2 HDD bays and the RAM slot locations.

 

I was wondering the same thing, I have an mSATA drive coming today for my M17x.

I couldn't find anything either, even when watching tear down videos, so I figured I would just open it up and look around. I have to get to the under keyboard RAM slots anyway.

 

mSATA doesn't go in a "bay" in the traditional hard drive sense. Isn't that the whole point?

That said, I'm not sure where the mSATA connection is.

 

it's under the palmrest!, above the bluetooth module. left side of the touchpad.
i upgraded it myself to a msata version of the crucial M4
you need to take the whole laptop apart including the screen.

 

Thanks for the info! That's quite the disassembly!

 

yes i replaced the bluray drive too, that was more dissasembly
took my r4 apart exept the systemboard

 

Those m4 msata's are pretty hard to find

 

mSata is also slower than a regular SATA3 SSD. If you are going with only 2 drives, i.e., 1 larger HDD for storage, 1 smaller SSD for OS and programs, there really is no need to go with a mSata SSD.

it is nice though to have an option for a 3rd drive without having to dismantle the DVD/Blue ray drive

 

How much slower?

 

I'm going to be using two SSD's in the HDD bays for windows/gaming and an mSATA SSD to boot linux from.

SATA2 = 3gb/s
SATA3 = 6gb/s

So the performance gain can be fairly great, however an mSATA SSD will still decimate a spinning HDD, even if it's SATA3.

 

So fast enough to leave Windows 7 where it is and install games/etc on the SSD.

 

The msata port in R4 runs on SATA2.
so you will not get the 500 mbs read but the 175 mb/s write of the msata crucial will be possible.

Raid 0 of 1 msata crucial and 2 normal crucial ssd.
fast enough

 

I can't justify running RAID 0... Not worth the risk to data.

 

mwa i can, have a 10TB raid5 nas where all my data is located, if my raid0 collapses no problem, no loss.
but then again an normal hdd can crash like a raid 0 setup. dunno why people are so scared, i seriously never had a crashed raid0 in 8 years. *knocks on wood/tempting fate*

if you have 1 hdd with all data and crashes, still all gone, why is that different from a raid0?
if people are stupid not to make backups, then it doesnt matter what setup you run...

 

Likely because people don't back up as much as they should, and data is often irreplaceable.

My external hard drive back up happens every now and then, but not frequently enough

 

jup backups are key, everything can break.
i even backup my nas to cloud every night just in case my house burns down
only the 80GB of photo's i have is important and non replaceable, rest can be replaced.

 

Yes, but there's a lot of stuff that even if it could be replaced, would take a tremendous amount of time and effort to do so.

 

Xenn0x, where did you get your crucial msata? I have been looking up and down the net but I only see reviews and the 2.5" drives. I am looking to purchase 2 128gb c400 msatas! (I'm so sorry to take away from the topic.)

 

bought it in the netherlands from alternate.
took a few days but they delivered.

 

Xen, doesn't it bottleneck your performance to have 2 on SATA3 and 1 on SATA2?

Did you test your speeds with just the 2 normal Crucials on SATA3?

 

yes i did test it.

write went down with 180 mb/s and read went up with 200 mb/s. (350/1000 mb/s bench)
so eventually having the more write was interesting then having the extra read speed see screens