New Dell XPS 17 - SATA III?

I am confused, I thought the new dell XPS 17 did make a good use of SATA III internal drives...

The Dell rep is telling me the oposite, SATA III only.

True?

 

I called Dell and asked the same question because I got two different answers from Dell Online Chat. I got through to a Tech Spt lady who told me that the new SB chipsets do support SATA 3, and, from what else I've read, i tend to believe.
That said, I have an XPS 15 on order that I plan on upgrading to an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD when they come out in two weeks or so.

 

So what are the HDDs that ship with the xps 17? are they SATA I, II, or III? I can't seem to get an answer.

 

Does it matter? They are mechanical, slow drives and should be replaced with an ssd asap.

They are probably sata II though, but that doesn't mean they can come anywhere near the bandwidth limitations of even sata II. The latest review I think just got 33MB/s read speeds out of them. The Vertex 3 coming out will do ~550MB/s read speeds.

 

I am well aware of SSD superiority, but on a cost benefit analysis, It isn't worth it at this stage. Especially since the current predictions are that ssd's will drop in price from around $3/GB to $1/GB within the next 18 months. That is quite a savings for the time being.

 

The cost/benefit analysis, which is normally referred to as "opportunity cost" in economics, is unique to every person. To you, $3/GB may not be worth it while $1/GB may be. To me, $2/GB is worth it and I plan to purchase the Vertex 3 at just over $2/GB. I barely spent $1.40/GB on my first ssd, then I was hooked and will never go back to spinners.

Just for a fun comparison, lets set up a hypothetical in which you have 2 scenarios. In scenario a you went ahead and bought the ssd now spending $500 for the ssd. In scenario b you waited 18 months before buying that same ssd and at a price of 1/3 the original. Now we all know ssd's will dramatically speed up your computer, spending less time performing tasks and allowing you more time to do other things. This is the "opportunity cost" of buying the ssd and this is what we are comparing. It will be different for everyone, as everyone spends a different amount of time using the computer.

Let's say I use the computer for 1 hour a day, every day for the next 18 months, which, is an underestimation, but more normal. If the purchase of the ssd now saves me 20% of my time (I have no factual data what-so-ever, this is just hypothetical) when using the computer, this will save me a total of 12.5 minutes a day. Over an 18 month period, I will have saved over 114 hours of my time, at a cost of $333 dollars, which comes out around $3/hour. To me, that is worth it considering what I get paid hourly to do. If my computer usage increases, or the amount of time I save by using the ssd is actually more, the less I pay per hour. This ratio can also be reduced by purchasing a cheaper drive. For instance, if you bought a new $250 ssd, your would only be spending around $1.50/hour. Input your own scenarios to see how much you could save/spend per hour.

P=price of ssd now
h=hours spent per day
t=price per hour of use for first 18 months
0.2=percentage of time saved using ssd (this actual value is unknown to me)

t = ( ( ( h (547.5 ) 0.2 ) ) / ( ( 2 / 3 ) * p )

 

I am sorry I misspoke. I meant to say not worth it for me. I could care less what you do with your computer, just saying what I'm thinkin about what I need to do.

For me, storage space is still a necessity, so when I can get a 500GB ssd at a reasonable price, I will.

 

Nice maths NoSlow5oh, lol
Quite smart calculations there.

In all seriousness though, you might have convinced me to get an ssd now.
Well pushed me a bit closer that is.

 

Ok. So I am getting close to looking at a SSD. I need at least 250 GB, and I must have been looking in the wrong place, because newegg has a vertex for 375, but I believe that is a first series: OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX250G 2.5" 250GB

Newegg.com - OCZ Vertex Series OCZSSD2-1VTX250G 2.5" 250GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I also haven't seemed to be able to confirm what SATA the L702x even supports. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. I am trying to find a 250 for $500 or less.

 

Is the limited number of writes with flash SSDs an issue or are we talking about DRAM based SSDs here?

 

Ok, so the intel h67 chipset does support SATA 3, however we still do not know if it is for all of the drive slots.

 

Your numbers are good if you only do one thing on your laptop at a time. If you multi-task, you can pretty easily coordinate your tasks to work around the additional time a platter drive takes. Then the only time savings would be at startup/shutdown, but even then, pushing the on button and then getting a cup of coffee in the extra 20sec it takes for the platter to start isn't that much of a stretch.

Don't get me wrong, I have a 128 GB SSD boot drive on my desktop and simply love it. I just prefer the extra space on my laptop hard drive. It takes a lot of additional work on my desktop to ensure that the ssd boot drive doesn't fill up. In the case of a laptop, especially a single disk drive laptop like ours, it would be even tougher. You would either have to lose the BD drive for a second hdd or frequently attach an external drive to unload pictures/music/video etc.

Not something I want to mess with when I'm on the road for two weeks at a time. My music collection alone is 40GB, not counting a couple movies ripped to the hdd for the road and the fact that my camera uses about 20MB per picture.

 

Well, if you are multitasking, even the more reason to use an ssd, as you don't have to coordinate your tasks; the computer runs as fast as you do. I understand the reasoning for most people to not buy ssd's at the moment, which is price and storage space. I use a lot of programs from the full adobe creative suite to office ultimate including project and visio. Total, I have around 60GB worth of installed programs. I can't see anyone that uses more than that, unless it is a work/home computer, which shouldn't be that much more in programs. I had a 128GB ssd in the L501x, and plan to buy the vertex 3 240/256GB when it comes out. I will use my external 500GB USB 3.0 drive to store all my music, pictures, etc., and I don't see how that could be so hard to do, especially if you have network storage also. As far as pictures, I use RAW when doing HDR photos, and the file sizes can get pretty big as well. That's why I have a wireless printer with an SDHD network storage option, so all the pictures can stay on the card and I never have to hook up anything to my computer. I can edit, delete, or transfer them to network or external storage without having to store them on my internal ssd. If you are spending $1800 on a base laptop, there is no reason not to spend a little more to get it running at peak performance, with storage flexibility, to do what you want when you want it.

 

I sure hope so. The Crucial C400/Micron M4 and Vertex 3 both support SATA 3 6gb. They'll still be plenty fast at SATA 2 speeds but running them at SATA 3 would be great. Sandy Bridge supports it but if it required an additional SATA 3 chipset I doubt Dell added it.

 

Your logic about the SSD drive saving as much time as you guessed is flawed. It's based on linear work flow. Meaning you open one task, perform it, close that task and open another. If however you open one task, begin working, open another task, finish the first and move on to the second, there is no waiting. I agree that SSD's are faster, but I don't agree that their benefits in terms of time savings outweigh their cost at this time.

Personally, I don't like carrying around usb drives for storage. To some extent, the USB 3.0 spec will speed things up but even with usb 3.0, write speeds are only about 40MB/s so you need to factor the time lost to backing up to an external usb 3.0 drive into the calculation of SSD time savings.

My current macbooks 640GB hdd is over %50 full. As to how, it's simple. one linux VM, one XP VM, one Win7 VM, a Win 7 boot camp partition, plus my music, 3 ripped DVD's for the airplane, and 20GB of pictures.

I do also agree that a 256GB SSD would definitely be much more usable, just don't like the idea of $500, $300 maybe but not $500.

I can however easily see using a 128GB SSD as a boot drive on an L702X and putting a larger spindle drive in the empty drive bay. This would work great in my opinion and solves both problems. You get the speed of the SSD boot drive without having to plug a usb drive in to move stuff around.

I'm not saying you shouldn't buy the 256GB SSD, only that your point about "opportunity cost" is flawed. You need to account for the non linear work flow most people use as well as your time lost backing up to an external USB drive. Other than that, I'm patiently awaiting $300 256GB SSD drives.

It would also be nice if someone could actually confirm the presence and proper operation of SATA III on Dells new SandyBridge XPS's. I know people have gotten conflicting information from Dell techs, but quite frankly I wouldn't trust them to know anyway.

 

Anyone with an L702x and a SATA III SSD to confirm speeds?

 

Hi, The HM67 chipset on the L702x has 6 sata ports.

The first two ports (0 and 1) are sata III 6gb/s
The other 4 ports (2-5) are sata II 3gb/s

I reckon you would need a good SSD to take advantage of the higher speeds on the the Sata III ports and all the ports are faster than you average Platter HDD.

Hope this helps.

 

Yes it's built into the Sandy Bridge spec, but we don't know if the L702x takes advantage of it. I'm getting an OCZ Vertex 3 SSD which does get better speeds at SATA 3 than SATA 2. I really hope it's SATA 3 but I'm skeptical until I see some proof. People have been receiving 900p L702x's, but I don't think any of the owners have a SATA 3 drive to test.

Vertex 3 at SATA 2 (3gb/s)



Vertex 3 at SATA 3 (6gb/s)



As you can see, SATA 3 is a huge performance boost on newer SSD drives.

 

I`ve ordered a OSZ vertex 3 128gb , looks like early April before stocks come in.

 

Anyone had a chance to try a SATA III drive in their L502 or L702?

Released SATA III SSD to date:

Crucial C300
Corsair Performance 3
Intel 510
Plextor PX-M2

OCZ Vertex 3 and Crucial C400 should be out any day now.