Alienware 18: hard drive upgrade help

I have recently purchased an Alienware 18, And would like to instal a Samsung 840 Evo 500gb msata as a boot drive and two 2tb segate drives for storage.

From my understanding I should add only the msata card and set the bios options to legacy boot and set Sata to raid then install Windows 8.1 from the provided disc and install any drivers from dells site and download any programs from my dell downloads then install my other 2 hard drives.

Did I miss anything there?


Is raid zero worth it for the mechanical drives? Or should I just leave them as separate drives?

Also seeing the power draw of the 18 having 2 hard drives and a msata wouldent that leave me with very little to no extra wattage headroom for overclocking right?




Thanks a lot for any help.

 

errr....do you intend to raid the 2 2tb drives? if yes, the you set to RAID - if no then AHCI.

better set the BIOS to UEFI.

most HDDs will have a max wattage of 4 watts on load so i think you'll have plenty of OC overhead for the GPUs.

RAID 0 means you combine both drives into 1....it means you have more combined space but if one of the HDDs fails then you've lost everything. what is the reason to do RAID 0?

 

Figured I would just leave it in raid regardless as I would have the choice to use Intel smart cache if needed for whatever reason.

Seeing that raid is more or less ACHI just with the support for linking drives together seems like it woudent hurt to leave it on raid regardless?

If I'm not mistaken, you can only get the Alienware head before the os boots up by choosing legacy as choseing UEFI will only make "Alienware" text appear before the os boots insted of getting the Alienware head before boot I could be mistaken though

Wasn't really that serious about raid 0 just a little curious

 

now you're just being picky on aesthetics: there's no point in going with legacy just to get the alien head over the text logo. so long as something shows letting you know it boots then it is all good.

besides BIOS is in itself outdated: when it boots the PC it runs in 16-bit mode in order to complete the post then switches to 64-bit. UEFI boots up in 64-bit and therefore it loads faster because the CPU doesn't have to switch between bit modes. besides, if you have 980Ms they run better in UEFI mode anyway.

again, if you don't need RAID then switch to AHCI. there's no point in having it just to look tech savvy.

 

Can you switch to UEFI after you instal Windowz?

 

No you can't, You need to do a clean install of Windows everytime you want to change it.

 

Alright now I'm confused Mr.Fox made a thread awhile ago about Windows's installation named "HOW TO: Windows Installation Thread (includes SATA III, SSD Upgrade, RAID0 Discussion)"

He is the one who recommended legacy and raid regardless of hard drive/drives

Other then legacy boot being slower aren't they more or less the same once Windows is loaded?


Another head scratcher is why dose the new Alienware 18 come loaded in legacy boot if UEFI offers better performance for 980m's anyways

 

that's because he's not a fan of UEFI and plus he mostly benchmarks his rigs. He is, as it is, an enthusiast. I some how doubt you'll be running your 18 at the same levels or even care to do so.

also alienware/dell did update the 18's BIOS so that the 980Ms would work. the AW17 R1 never got such an update. plus their 980Ms are using custom vBIOS.

take the help with a grain of salt.

 

So what it boils down to is LEGACY vs UEFI and RAIDvs ACHI

Other then UEFI being fater to boot I'm I really missing or gaing anything over legacy?

Also wont simply leaving sata on raid mode give you the same ACHI performance and compatibility regardless of not having a raid array?

If there is no downside with choseing RAID when not useing a raid array I don't see why to chose ACHI over it

 

legacy is just that: outdated....it's been around since the 70s, constantly being patched with workarounds to get new hardware to boot and interact correctly. even with an SSD it still boots slower into the OS because it's not running in a mode that's native to the hardware. the only time the SSD shows its speed is when the OS boots. You won't miss anything from moving to UEFI....it is more future proof.

your 18 was designed to run to have UEFI so i would take advantage of it.

having your drives in RAID mode won't magically help even if the drives are not in RAID mode....so honestly it's quite wasted, simply overkill. i would trade out those 2TB HDDs for SSDs: they load faster, take less power and less weight. again, only set to RAID if you intend to use RAID.

 

I get that raid mode won't speed up the drives but it will enable the use of Intel r.t.s for cacheing which can't be used with ACHI

Belive me I'd love to swap the hdds for ssds but large size ssd are to pricy to justify useing them to store steam games and I already got a msata for a boot drive

 

how many steam games are you installing that justifies 4TB? your entire library? are you going to play them all at the same time? no you are not.

2TB is reasonable but pushing it and even then i think you'll have a tough time filling even that.

RAID 1 is pointless since steam, origin, and uplay games can be backed up easily.

i'd keep those HDDs as external drives for videos, music or at least use one as an external and the other to use as a game drive.

 

Thanks for your time and help answering my questions

I have the drives laying around so I might as well install them

 

I have used a 1tb hybrid as a storeage drive (for my games) but never saw reason to add any more internale drives. I do have a large external drive i plug in occasionally to store some data on. Back up pictures etc...