M18xR2 - mSata port mystery!

Definitely I will post, I just need spare time to do it (already cleaned it and used some sandpaper here and there, ready to be painted). I got some good quality paint and I hope it will come out nice. I used to have an m17xR2 silver and I think that’s what I loved the most (All the cars I owned to date, were and are silver color; I guess some addiction ).

 

so john did you get that answer?

 

Nope. Still no answer.

 

Mine still has not shipped yet. Since they don't have the part in stock, they may not be able to answer the question with nothing to compare the photos to.

They already charged me for the part even though it is not ready for shipment, so I am not happy about that. Their response to my email was essentially, " Sorry for the delay due to stock availability.......... waiting stock from Dell and send to you asap. It could only be process and ship out after 1 weeks if stock available. Sorry for the delay."

 

(Me speaking out loud to ones self, so to speak)

Ok....I'm not exactly sure who they know at Dell that we don't! And since everyone we talked to doesn't even know what the actual part numbers is, who do they have a contact at dell with? And just what part of Dell are the contacting?
To damn funny there. I think we need someone from dell to ask them who it is they are talking to for this elusive part.

 

yes i agree..

 

It would not surprise me if what they really meant by that is they were waiting for a some of them to mysteriously disappear from part bins at the Compal factory, LOL. I think PCHub is in that part of the world.

 

LOL!
That would be messed up if that was the case.

 

Remember who we are dealing with here.

Same group of folks that jump off of rooftops and commit suicide to protest their work environment.

 

Indeed. So now we wait.

 

i called Dell in canada and they dont have the parts. I then tried Dell in the US and told them I called from within US, they still do not have parts. both bracket/cable are out so how do these guys get theirs?

 

Well, so far it looks like they have not. I am going to give them one more week to see if they can produce it, and then ask for a refund if they have not. Charging customers parts they do not have before they ship is unethical.

 

have to call to cancel now..

 

I sent another email asking:
(a) why their web page says "In stock now ready to ship in 24 hours" when it is not
(b) why they charged me for a part they have not shipped

Their last reply said "maybe 1 or 2 more weeks" and to that I say, refer to (a) and (b) above.

 

lol their brain going numb for sure, they answered neither of the two questions..

 

So does the R2 even come with a Msata connector if you bought the machine without an Msata drive ?.


I have an R2 coming i wanted to use a small Msata drive i had kicking around and thought great i can put that to use finally but now i am reading all this and wondering if the machine does not originally come with Msata they omit the cable and connector entirely.

 

I don't know the answer to that question. I would assume it is pre-wired for it, but that could be entirely wrong.

The cable is readily available and I have one. I asked my contact in Alienware parts for help finding the service part (mSATA bracket) and nobody can identify it. I asked if I were to purchase a new bottom chassis if it would come with the bracket attached and the answer to that question is also unknown. He has reached out to someone else and cannot get a straight answer about it.

N22TH seems to be the right part number but nobody has confirmed it for me, or whether that part number can be ordered. I have reached out to one of our Alienware reps here in the forum for assistance, since there are several of us that would like to purchase this item.

 

Thanks for the reply Fox and that was my concern after reading the thread was actually getting the part or rather even all the parts to make up the assembly could prove to be a nightmare.

Sometimes when you order a machine without something they do not see the need of including it and are not obligated to do so either as you did not pay for it and they do not owe it to you.

I hope it does come pre wired from the factory but i just remember the huge debacle back in the M17x R1 days of them including a second hard drive caddy because you did not buy the machine with 2 HDs they did not include it . That took about a year or 2 to get ironed out where it became standard.

Hopefully someone who owns an R2 but did not order an Msata drive with it can let me know if it does indeed include one by default.

 

I heard from one our of Alienware reps here in the forum and N22TH is the correct part number. However, it is not available except as a service item for depot replacement of an existing broken or defective part. It cannot be sold as a spare part.

I also heard back from PCHub.com and they told me that they should have my part with a stock order to be received on March 7 (tomorrow) and it should ship on March 8. More to follow.

 

Speedy confirmed his M18xR2 came with the Msata port already installed even without having ordered a drive with the machine so hopefully mine is that way as well.

Im sure another R2 owner can confirm or deny it comes stock on the machine or not.

i know some of you guys swapped it R2 boards and that is really how this thread came to be in the first place which makes sense the board did not come with the proper cabling etc.

 

Still waiting on mine they told me by the end of the week?? But my r2 board is 1month away so doesn't really mater lol

 

My R2 is supposed to arrive tomorrow. I'll pop the bottom off and check for you.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

Confirmed. It's there and I didn't order a drive to go in it.

 

Thanks for confirming Jsheldon. Put my mind at ease i would not have to rush out an buy an SSD.

 

Bought the R2 back in may and have the msata port even though I did not order a msata ssd. I doubt they will remove such a feature in later r2's

 

I was not concerned so much that they would remove it in newer models but was waiting for confirmation it had one at all unless you bought it with one since no one had said otherwise.

Since this thread originated from an R1 owner who bought an R2 motherboard it was probably the wrong place to ask and i should have just directed the question to the owners lounge.

 

No worries. I am glad you asked. It's good info. There are probably others wondering the same thing as you. Maybe some of those that want to buy the mSATA bracket can buy them from R2 owners that do not intend to use it.

 

Ye Lin Oo 3/8/2013 4:20:49 PM Action:Shipped
Ye Lin Oo 3/8/2013 4:20:52 PM Sent Email Invoice

woohoo we will soon know if this is the correct part it has been shipped. now i need the cable.

and they have added more here

 

Brother Dan! If I read it correctly, this is the board and cable, so you may not need to buy that.



Mine has shipped, too. Yay!

Now it's time to find a decent mSATA SSD for a good price.

Edit: Ordered this one... Mushkin Enhanced Atlas Series MKNSSDAT120GB-DX mSATA 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

 

Hi Fox yes i emailed them it includes both parts woohoo now i think i may get just get that same msata

 

I wanted a larger one, but I don't want to spend $300+ on a 256GB or larger mSATA SSD until I know it works well. That one is a great price for 120GB. It was only $109 USD with upgraded shipping.

I got a notice from DHL that the part from PCHub.com has cleared customs in Hong Kong. Yay!

 

nice to know its shipping. I picked up crucial m4 256gb msata on ncix for 160 on sale, pretty lucky I saw it on last day and added to cart then it was removed from listing but still allow me to checkout.

 

That is a good price. That particular M4 is usually around $300.

 

Newegg.com - Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, LED LCD TV, Digital Cameras and more!

 

Um, that might explain it being so inexpensive. If it is that M4, it seems to have low MTBF and much lower IOPS. The one I had looked at before was just under $300, which is way overpriced. (The really good price with high IOPS is why I chose the Mushkin.) Still undecided if I am going to use it for installation as the second OS drive (in place of the 2.5" M4 I am using for Win8 now) or cache the 1TB Seagate and put in the BD-writer again... or buy a second 1TB Seagate for 2TB RAID0 and cache it with the mSATA, leaving the BD-writer in the eSATAp enclosure.

 

I use the the 240 & 512 for storage while the raid is for everything else. I chose that drive because it was just about the best out of all of them and it had a nice price. I also got the house for that drive to turn it into a normal ssd drive. It's also sata 3. And you dont need separate drives for windows 7/8 just dual boot it on your raid.

 

Yes, I ran Windows 8 on a partition on the same SSD RAID0 initially and it worked perfectly fine. I had no problems with it. I just prefer having it on a drive of its own. I have W8 on the 128GB M4 all by itself right now. If I decide to ditch W7 or W8 for any reason, I think it is just a tad faster/easier to get rid of one OS with no partitions involved or intermingling. If installed without the other OS being detected during setup, it works even better because I can use F12 during POST and select the drive I want to boot from with no boot.ini/bcd changes to either OS. They are ignorant to the other OS being present in the same system that way. I have done the same thing with Linux in the past and I like having no shared bootloader.

 

Brother Fox,

I concur with Brother John, The Mushkin Enhanced Atlas mSATA 240GB SATA III is a great drive and on sale too :thumbsup:

 

No problem

 

most msata drives sux, except for intel 525 but uses too much power, well they'll all cap at sata3gbps anyway so it's the 4k qd1 random that matters.

that aside, waiting for my bracket and cable

 

I ordered the smaller one for $100. I would have preferred the 240GB, but it wasn't in my budget right now. Looks this the specs are more or less the same other than capacity.

 

Parts arrived today...

 

Luck Mr Fox still waiting on my R2 Parts & This lol

Where are you going to mount yours Fox?

 

Nice. Fully loaded now Mr Fox.

 

I tested each SSD running on SATA2 ports individually before I decided what to do with them. I decided to put Windows 8 in RAID0 using my existing Crucial M4 with the new Mushkin mSATA. Their read/write performance was very similar. They actually outperform the crappy old OCZ Agility 3 SSD with incompressible data. The Agility 3 rocks pretty hard with compressible data (only) and I already knew that. But, I did not expect that the SATA2 RAID0 would outperform the SATA3 RAID0 with incompressible data. I guess I did not realize the Agility 3 performance was this poor with incompressible data transfers. I ended up having to do a clean install of Windows 8... it did not play nice with being converted to RAID0 with RST the way Windows 7 does. (It worked initially, but after rebooting it would lock up while loading Windows after the RAID0 conversion.)

Anyhow, below are the comparisons. Actually, I think the performance of the Mushkin Atlas mSATA with the Crucial M4 in RAID0 is pretty great, even though it is SATA2. I lost 7GB because the Atlas is 120GB and the M4 is 128GB, but it's not enough disk space to worry about.

So, now I have 5 internal drives... dual SSD RAID0 and 1TB HDD for data. Never thought I would see that in a laptop.

​

 

rofl Mr Fox, we all crave for max capacity, awesome to see you got yours now im just waiting for mine good thing I didnt cancel lol now you'll just have to find a way to fit that msata with R1 chassis.

it'll be amazing to see haswell running full sata 6gbps on all of these drives, get to see some massive raid0. too bad haswell got usb 3.0 issues when waking up from sleep state ewww

 

It was not easy to fit. I'm not 100% pleased with how it is installed at this point. I might pull the palm rest and see if I can wrap the cable up to the top side of the motherboard and place it above it. I have the bracket attached to plastic card similar to a credit card and it is sitting in the space above the memory because there is no other place to put it on the bottom side with the R1 chassis base.

 

It can fit, but after it looked like I was going to be messing things up I just bought the bottom base. Glad I did now.

 

JohnKss,

Where did you get the R2 bottom case?

Thank you,
Monnie

 

The way I have it is not going to mess anything up because it is well insulated and does not put pressure on anything. But, it might restrict air flow around the memory modules. I'm not liking that part. I may end up buying a chassis base as well if I cannot find a good place for it on top (between the palm rest and the motherboard) with the limited amount of cable length involved.