G51VX-X1A with SSD

Hello,

I am planning to purchase and install an SSD into the secondary Hard Drive bay and use it as a my boot drive and use the current HDD for storage.

This one:

Newegg.ca - OCZ Vertex 2 OCZSSD2-2VTXE60G 2.5" 60GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

What cables and things do I need? Does anyone know?

I checked the estore from asus, their bracket seems to be always out of stock.
So I just need that and a Sata Cable...and screws?

Thanks.

 

You won't need any additional cables, but it's best if you purchase a HDD caddy to secure the SSD to the HDD bay. You may have to put your SSD in the primary HDD bay (the one that's currently being used) if you want to make the SSD the boot drive, though I'm not certain of this.

 

Well, I've put my SSD into the G51vx-RX05 (The X1A's retarded brother) ,and it's even simpler than what David says.

There are two open bays on the G51vx, one near the GPU and another on the far side. I highly suggest you put the SSD in the slot near the GPU, since an SSD is very resistant to heat and generates very little of it to boot. Since an SSD is also tough, you don't need a bracket, though I suggest a caddy like David says. (There are foam inserts there to give ou a semi-stable mounting; I had a regular HDD without bracket for a couple of weeks and nothing bad happened).

All you need to do it slip the SSD into the SATA port and you're good to go.

Concerning booting, you can put your SSD into either port and it'll boot no problem. Just make sure when you're installing Windows to make the boot order your ODD and then the SSD.

 

Oh good. It's quite simple then. Then I don't need to wait for the Asus Bracket thing to be in stock.

Now I just need to wait for the SSD price to go down or for it to go on sale. Lol.

And I'm not sure what you mean by ODD and then the SDD?

Thanks guys.

 

Well that's interesting, I changed my hdd in my G50V a week ago, added 2 320GB WD scorpio black hdd. Now you probably know how the inside of the G50V is, but still here it is : the first hdd bay has foam and all, and it is less deep than the second one, so the hdd doesn't move at all in it.
The Second bay though, is deeper, has no foam to secure the hdd, thus it does move when it's plugged in without anything to secure.

What I did is cut some foam from the packaging in which I was delivered the HDDs, put it on the bottom of the 2nd hdd bay, plugged in the HDD to the SATA port and put some more foam above it so that it's pretty tight when I close the back cover.

But after reading this, I'm still concerned that it might be a little dangerous, especially when I hear the HDD ticking once in a while, sometimes when I'm not even on the computer (but maybe that is just normal in a 2.5" 7200 hdd, I can't tell since it's the first one I have).

So anyways, would you advise me to purchase some kind of bracket or caddy for that 2nd hdd so it's more secure ? or am I just concerned for nothing ..?

Thanks =)

 

I would, of course, suggest getting a bracket to protect against any accidents. Never hurts to be a little extra careful with data.

But you're right about the depth of the ports. You can't just foam-mount your SSD/HDD in the deeper port, both because it's deep and there's a distinct lack of foam.

However, remember that SSDs are tough components. Put the bracket on the HDD, put that HDD in the "away-from-GPU" SATA bay, and just foam-mount the SSD in the remaining slot.

By the way, I noticed my WD 3200BEKT tended to click a bit here and there, as does my current Hitachi 7k500.

 

Ticking can be two things:
- normal R/W access (nowadays it's pretty impossible to stop Windows from accessing the HDD at least 3 times every minute...)
- R/W heads parking -- not so good if it happens too often, since the HDD is rated for a max number of head parks. Some seagates did this a while back, it was due to a firmware problem.

The two sounds should be easy to differentiate, the second is a much more well-defined, distinct "click" than the first.

As to foam below and above the HDD, try not to cover the breathing hole of the HDD as that can lead to problems.

 

I'll open it up and check this. Sometimes the raid controller on boot doesn't detect the raid correctly, and I have to boot my pc several times before it correctly goes on. I do have to setup the IDE controller on RAID in bios, not ENHANCED, right ?

Since I enabled RAID, my bios takes much longer to end (if I disable quiet boot, I actually see it's because of the raid detecting or whatsoever... ) making it pointless to have faster R/W for boot since the bios screen is just way longer than before ^^

 

If you have a RAID0 setup(you have according to your sign), you have to choose the RAID option.
why you have sacrificed 320 GB for a slight increase in performance?
also if one of your HDDs fails your whole data will be lost

 

What do you mean with sacrificed 320GB ?
I have 640GB atm and it's more than enough in my opinion. Especially since the old hdd inside was a 640GB scorpio blue @ 5400rpm and it's now an external hdd, so I have a total of 1.2TB, while my old pc had like 60GB... It's like a revolution to me

 

How do I enable AHCI? I only see "Enhanced, Raid and something else, I forgot, I think it was normal." My laptop is default as Enhanced, so I'm guessing Enhanced is enabled and I don't need to change anything?

 

Enhanced is the droid you are looking for.

 

ODD = optical disk drive
SDD = Standard disk drive? Unless they meant SSD...

 

I meant boot order.

Put the DVD drive as the primary boot device, followed by the SSD. (I'm sure you know how to install an OS, but just saying.)

 

Ah I see, cool. Thanks. I'll give you a rep power !

 

i thought you have RAID1 which mirrors the data stored on 1 disk to another, and then you have only 1/2 space of your phys. devices.
You have RAID0, which hasn't any mirroring but has "block-level striping" which means (from wiki

so a single fail on one of them => no data at all

 

Ok I see what you mean. That's no big deal really, they're new and I'm not running any kind of server or something to justify redundancy for RAID1 ... And for the rest, it's risky but I guess when SSD prices get a little lower, i'll get one so no more raid

 

Okay, so I just got the SSD today.

Here is the result:

Duplicating a file on desktop, seems quite slow:


ATTO benchmark:


My Windows Experience Index is:

7.7 for the Primary Hard Disk. Shouldn't it be higher?

I already enabled AHCI to Enhanced. I disabled Windows Prefetcher and Windows Vista Super Fetch, and disabled Disk Defragmenter in Services. Downloaded intel RST also. Update the latest firmware 1.1, but my OCZ-VERTEX2 driver in Device Manger, driver's date is 6/21/2006 and Driver Version: 6.1.7600.16385.

This is normal right? Seems slow when copying the file on desktop. Maybe I forgot to download something.

 

Well, two things I should note. You're copying almost 69k files in that copying test. I'm not sure since I'm not an expert, but I think copying lots of tiny files will be slower than one big file. Second thing is that I have the exact same WEI score for the SSD.

How are your Crystal scores?

 

Seem very low now...

Actually, I think I didn't enabled ACHI in the BIOS, where is that setting in this laptop, can't find it.

 

Hmm, I'm having issues with Standby, BSOD with 0xF4 error code and such coming back from Standby.

I've talk to OCZ and they said "we come across some systems that have compatibilty problems with standby and our ssd drives. the best thing is to not use standby"

I was in the middle of RMAing this too. Since they said that, the new SSD would have problems too. I have the Vertex 2 60 GIG version.

Does anyone else have this laptop and this SSD and have this problem? It seems I have to get a refund and buy another SSD. Or find a solution...