L502x SSD Upgrade, am I doing it right?

I have a scratch and dent L502x from the dell outlet store sitting in the other room waiting on my birthday (wife's orders...). Before I even fire it up I am itching to get an SSD in there to really make it fly. I also have a couple hundred bucks in Amazon gift cards so I am going to source everything from there.

Dunno if I can post links or not but I'll give it a shot:
128 GB Crucial M4 SSD Amazon.com: Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2: Electronics
HDD Caddy http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005FO2BCG
Enclosure for DVD Drive Amazon.com: USB2.0 Slim DVD / CD RW Burner External Enclosure Caddy Case with SATA Connetor For all Laptop Notebook dvd cd burner[ Case only!! Drive is not included !!]: Electronics


My plan is to put SSD under the palm rest and move the 750GB 7200rpm drive to the optical bay, then put the dvd/rw drive in an external enclosure. From there I will boot from windows 7 dvd (in external enclosure), wipe the OEM HDD and do a fresh install onto the SSD without bloatware.

Sound like a plan or am I missing something?

 

SSD in the main drive, HDD in the caddy, optibay in external. Perfect.

Great choice of SSD btw, you couldn't have picked a better SSD lol. One thing though, sometimes the optibay interfaces are fitted with SATA 1 ports, though I can't speak for your specific laptop, but my optibay makes use of SATA 1 so it won't be as fast as the main drive bay. I don't think it's significant in your case though, since u'll just be having data in it and running your OS in a monster SSD.

Hope this helps.

 

this guide might be usefull to you How to: Setup SSD boot drive with secondary Hard disc optimization

 

That looks like the right way to go and the route I'm going except I got the Intel 520 SSD instead. I'm waiting on my ODD enclosure to come in to put my 750GB in there.

 

I am debating on ODD enclosure or SATA to eSATAp cable.

Enclosure gives a nice finished product, but usb 2.0 connection, SATA->eSATAp cable uses the eSATA port, but leaves the drive bare. My gut tells me to go with the USB 2.0 enclosure, but part of me wants to use eSATA just because it is there...

 

Are you sure really Need SSD? For me Need do/buy 3 thing for SSD. Sorry, I don't do this stupid thing.

better wait next gerenation notebook default is SSD 1T is better.

 

Your going to be waiting a long time. A SSD can't beat the price/size ratio of a conventional HDD (less than $1/GB). That's even after the Thailand floods.

 

Exactly, dont know what your getting at alinad.

 

not sure anyone ever knows what Alinad is getting at.

I've just purchased a samsung 830 which i couldn't be happier with, comes with norton ghost and a sata to usb adaptor as well.

I've yet to move my 750gb to the optical bay slot as i'm not sure of the best place to get a caddy in the UK, any suggestions?

 

I just did the same exact thing with my l502X (only I went with the 256GB M4). The ODD Bay is Sata 2, so you'll get 3Gb/s on the 750GB drive there. It was the best upgrade I did to my XPS.

 

The Samsung 830 was my 2nd choice as the Intel 520 and Samsung 830 were rated the 2 best SSDs as far as reliability goes. I bought the Intel from Amazon since the price dropped to $184 matching Newegg.

 

Do you get any vibrations from the 750GB HDD in the optical bay? Did you use the stuff I linked from Amazon or did you go through newmodeus?

I have never had a system with a SSD so I am a little excited and a little nervous at the idea.

 

I just installed the 750GB in the caddy and put it in my laptop. I don't notice any vibration. I have the same caddy that you linked from Amzntek. Although I can hear the HDD I think it is because there is a really light fan sound it seems like on the right side of the laptop now.

 

My hdd in the optical bay makes a bit of noise when it vibrates against the caddy. You can buy some rubber things to stop it from vibrating but it doesn't come with the caddy.

Haven't tried a newmodeus one... it might come with those things but at 4x the price (I got my caddy for around $10...) I don't think it's worth it. Also, you should buy the cheapest version of the caddy that looks like the one you are getting.... they are all essentially the same. All the 'special' pieces you need to make the caddy fit in your laptop you can take from your dvd drive. For example, the drive I bought was labeled for some random hp laptop model and works perfectly in my XPS. I just recently bought a thinkpad t520 and, unsuprisingly, the ultrabay optical drive has all the pieces that can easily be unscrewed and attached to the $10 caddy I bought so that the caddy fits in the thinkpad ultrabay.....

edit: with pics

The only difference between dell optical drive and lenovo optical drive is:
1) thing at the back that connects to laptop
2) removeable faceplate
3) this tab, not present on dell optical drive.

The only thing I did to the 'HP' ebay caddy is take the tab thing in pic one off my dell optical drive and take the faceplate off the dell optical drive. I don't think 2 minutes of work is worth the extra $8-$10 you are paying... if the model you bought even comes with the extra pieces pre-installed.

 

Thanks for the great info!

Just waiting for Amazon to issue my credit and I will pull the trigger.

 

$200 later and a bit of frustration...it is done!

A couple tips for others considering the same:

-The ribbon cables that attach to the palm rest are a PAIN to get reconnected, you can probably swap the HDD without removing them, just carefully work around the palm rest.
-I did a fresh windows install on the SSD, however I couldn't get it to boot after install was finished, re-intalled 4x, tried repairing the installation a bunch of times. No luck. Had to disconnect the HDD in the caddy and do the install while the SDD was the only drive to get it to work. Once windows was booting fine I was able to reinstall the HDD and get it to format properly.
-With the frustration taking the caddy in/out a few times I lost the screw that retains the optical bay drive, after 20 minutes of frustrated searching I was able to find it.

Boot times are amazing with the SDD, I am still on my old laptop while I finish installing all drivers and windows updates (plus I am still a week short of my birthday, which the XPS is technically a present I can't use until then...)

 

Congrats! Yea I think the hard drive is located somewhat poorly... you can't even place the cover flat without disconnecting the cable or without having it get in your way.

Also I don't know how you installed your windows, but for anyone using a usb key method remember to copy the wifi drivers to your flash drive as well because they don't come with a new install of windows (you can prepare other driver install files as well, but at least with wifi you can download the others. I guess you can skip this if you have access to ethernet cables). Also, use the flash drive with the usb/esata port on the right side. Trying to use the usb3.0 ports before loading the drivers caused my installer to refuse to continue without 'dvd drivers' and had me waste several hours reformatting and recopying all the files to my slowwwwwwww usb key.

 

I have never unplugged the ribbon cables when removing the hdd. There is enough slack in it to slightly move the cover out of the way to access the screws.

 

You are right on the drivers and USB thing! I forgot to mention that. My system booted with no wifi drivers, no ethernet drivers, and none of the USB ports worked! I was stumped until I realized the eSATA/USB2.0 port, it worked with my key.

I followed a few tutorials to setup a USB 3.0 windows install (complete with auto loading USB 3.0 drivers!) and it was blazing fast, but even though the installer loaded usb 3.0 drivers, the finished product didn't have them. Not sure how that works.

 

You probably already know this but make sure you have the latest firmware update for your M4. =)

 

Yep, got new firmware, made sure TRIM was enabled, turned off superfetch, prefetch and bootfetch, disabled defrag, turned off a bunch of system logs I don't need, etc.

Found a great post on sevenforums that gave me all the info I needed.

 

Looking into moving the "users" directory off the SSD and onto the HDD...

Total space of Windows 7 Home Premium install with all updates/drivers and microsoft security essentials is just under 30 gig.

 

I got around the same figure with 8gb ram. To get some more space out of your ssd, try moving the page file to another drive or reducing its size. You can also turn off hibernate (if you never use it) and delete hiberfil.sys

That would save 15gb for me, but I have 240gb so I haven't bothered.

 

If you don't use hibernate, you can turn it off to gain back as much disk space as you have system RAM (i.e. 8GB in my case - sig.). On a laptop hibernate can be useful though, it depends on your uses. With an SSD the boot is so fast I don't hibernate, whereas I often did on my old laptop.

Linky to disable/enable hibernate

EDIT: Ninja'd. In the link above, it automatically deletes hiberfile.sys and disables the options so you don't try to hibernate without the sys file

 

Heh, yea I used to hibernate all the time with my spinning hard drives because it was so much faster than shutting down and starting up again.

However, once I upgraded to 8gb ram and vertex 2 ssd, it was much faster to shut down than to hibernate (needed to write all the memory in use to hard drive... don't know if it wrote the whole 8gb or just the used part but it certainly seemed longer) while starting times (cold start vs hibernate resume) were about the same. Also, it didn't help that the vertex 2 bluescreened from hibernate 75% of the time.... so now I never hibernate =(

Anyway, for the OP, I think you should go for a 2.5'' ssd and look into swapping out your optical drive for hard drive caddy and put a 2.5'' hdd there. I think the ideal setup is to configure your laptop to have the cheapest drive from the factory (500gb 5400 rpm drive?), buy a 2.5'' ssd and buy a 12.7mm caddy off ebay for like $10. Of course, this depends on how comfortable you are with opening up your laptop (bit more difficult than average, but youtube shoudl be able to help) and whether you need your optical drive or not (you can always buy an external enclosure and use it like that) but in general I think that msata ssds are not worth their price... They cost more, run slower and don't really have any advantages besides making use of your (possibly) unused wwan slot.

 

OP already has a 128GB Crucial M4 (a great drive btw OP!) and put the factory drive in a caddy...I think the opening up the system ship has sailed

 

Whoops sorry I think I got confused with another thread I was posting in...

 

Haha, yeah. I got a great deal on an outlet L502x, so I ended up with a 750GB 7200 rpm Momentus drive (not XT). It is now in the caddy. My install size is 30 gig with hibernate disabled. I have not tried to shrink it at all yet, it is just a normal, full install of Win7 Home Premium after all drivers, updates, SP1, etc.

I think I will keep the page file on the SSD, because I believe the speed of the SSD will be a benefit, although I have read arguments on both sides.

So far I am very pleased with the M4 drive, maxed out the windows experience scale at 7.9! I have not timed a cold boot yet, but it is BLAZINGLY fast. Probably under 30 seconds if I had to guess.

 

This is the guide i used to move it How to: Setup SSD boot drive with secondary Hard disc optimization

You'll be surprised how much space your users folder takes up with all your music, docs and videos etc.

 

Well I'll give you my opinion, but as you noted thoughts vary on this one.

I do a normal Windows install. Then if I'm on an SSD I run WEI, ensure TRIM is enabled, and disable defrag. Nothing beyond that is required.

I sometimes turn off indexing on the SSD, it doesn't seem to have a noticable impact either way. Page file I leave alone, having on the SSD you will certainly benefit from. However, one idea is to reduce the page file size, if you have 6+GB of RAM and don't usually use up most of that, reducing the page file to say 2GB will save space on the SSD while still giving you the benefits of the page file if you need. I personally don't bother, but that is the way I would be going if I were to touch the page file.

I've never moved the users folder, but since for about 8 years I've always put my data on a separate HDD/partition, I've gotten in the habit of immediately re-mapping the Documents, Videos, Music, and Pictures folder links (libraries in Win 7) to point to the proper folders on my data drive (D:/). The rest of the users stuff I leave alone since it holds file from various programs that I figure, correctly or not, might as well stay on the fast-access drive. Thus the bulk of the space-hogging stuff gets moved while the stuff that gets accessed more often doesn't. This scheme also means that my data drive stays parked in a lot of my usage times if I'm just playing games or surfing the 'net. It spins up whenever I need to access data, which results in a couple-second delay the first time but it's not a big deal for me.

With that said, I use larger SSD's on my personal systems, where the extra GB or so of space is not a big problem.

 

I just ordered the enclosure for the dvd drive. My estimated delivery says April 10th. Have you gotten yours in? If so, how is the quality and how well does it work?

 

I got it way ahead of when it was expected. Quality is good enough, it is a clamshell plastic enclosure with one tiny circuit board. I couldn't get the drive to slide in, had to take the two halves apart and fit the drive in that way. Gets the job done. The faceplate does not sit perfectly flush on the drive. But for something I am only going to use every few months, it will be fine.

I don't think the build quality is good enough to trust it carried around in a laptop bag for daily use though.

 

Cool, thanks. I'll be carrying it around in my backpack but probably won't be using it very often, for one of those 'just in case' things.

 

Hi Pusta,
I have bought some months ago this laptop (xPS L502x) with this configuration:

CPU i7-2630QM
RAM 8GB (2x 4GB @1333MHz)
HDD 750GB 7,2K
GPU GT540
etcc..

I want to buy now a new SSD like Vertex 3 or Crucial M4 but I don't know if the motherboard support SATAIII or SATAII only.

Can you please confirm that SATA3 drives are supported and they work as SATA 3 speed?

 

Yes sata 3 is supported.

 

SATAIII, SATA 3 Yes, the XPS L502X supports SATA 6Gb/s. HWiNFO:

 

So this can be settled once and for all, has anyone tested their drive in the optical bay?

 

Got my enclosure in for the optical drive. I think it works pretty good and the quality isn't that bad for the price that was paid. The only thing I don't care for is it requiring 2 USB plugs (data + power)

 

I got an SSD for $55 bucks -- turns out it was SATA II, not III (don't know how I missed it, or maybe I thought it was so good a deal I would just get it). It's a Vertex Plus R2 120GB. Question is: Should I get a SATA III for the L502X, or will I be fine with the SATA II drive? I feel that I've never experienced write speeds even close to 3GB/s, so how would I ever get to use 6? Is the 6GB/s speed purely theoretical, or are there some instances where it will actually be achieved?

Thanks...

 

SATA II is limited to about 250MB/s. Still due to the low random access times, you probably won't notice the difference between SATA II and SATA III and both should feel snappy.

 

OK, everyone...I installed it. It's SATA II, says 300 mb/s on the package. Here are the results:

Before:


After:


What do you think? I expected higher transfer, but this is still much faster for starting up and launching apps like photoshop. To do the migration, I used DriveImageXML which worked excellently. Prior to that, I formatted the drive using quick format and all the default settings in windows 7. It did not boot initially, but then I ran a repair using the windows 7 dvd, and it reported no system partition and added one.

Did I do it right?

Thanks!

 

FYI, for the above charts, here is the pertinent info:

BEFORE
Minimum: 14.2 MB/s
Maximum: 187.5 MB/s
Average: 123.6 MB/s
Access time: 0.135 ms
Burst Rate: 65.9 MB/s
CPU Usage: 3.5%

AFTER
Minimum: 25.3 MB/s
Maximum: 105.7 MB/s
Average: 77.7 MB/s
Access time: 18.1 ms
Burst rate: 115.7 MB/s
CPU Usage: 2.4%

I wonder how I can get it closer to the 300 MB/s speed...

 

I'm using a Samsung 830 Series 128gb SSD with an L502x, i7-2630 with 6gb of RAM. My numbers are much higher than yours, but my drive is SATA 3.

 

So, clearly something is wrong on my end. Either my drive is slower (i.e. sata 2 vs 3) or my setup was wrong (maybe a badly formatted drive, or alignment issue?). I don't understand why sata 2 would be the bottleneck when even the sata 3 drive is not reaching the limit of sata 2.

 

Does your xps have blu ray? and if so is the external enclosure still enable blu ray playback?

 

It might have, I don't remember. I removed the optical drive and used a new "bay" to hold the hard drive in its place.

 

amazon is having a sale on crucial ssd right now fyi

Amazon.com: Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT256M4SSD2: Electronics

 

HI
Excuse me, i have the same question, please if anyone know the answer help me;
I have L502x, i7-2630 with 6gb of RAM, 1) Is it better that i place the SSD instead of DVDRW or HDD instead of it? my mobo is ACHI67 and support SATA3, and i need more speed.
2) My HDD or SSD in caddy replaced instead of DVDRW will connect with SATA3 or 2? i don't know it!!

 

Put your SSD in the original HDD space. The laptop can't boot from the DVD drive bay, so you won't be able to put the OS on it unless its in the original HDD space.