XPS M1730 Configuration Changes

I was just on the Dell site and noticed that some configuration options for the XPS M1730 have changed...for instance it doesn't come with Blu-ray by default anymore and you can't select a single hard drive option. Before I was able to select a "200GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)" but I don't see that as an option anymore. The equivalent seems to be the "RAID Performance: 400GB (2x200GB) 7200RPM". Do you think it is RAID-0 or RAID-1?

Also do you think they will bring back the old choices or can I request them? Also what do these changes in configuration usually mean...did they find that the original configuration was causing problems?

Finally with the two SLI 8700 NVIDIA cards...is SLI enabled by default or will Dell have to release drivers for them? I thought on the Alienware website, when customizing a M9750, it said that you can purchase SLI but Vista doesn't support it yet and you will be e-mailed the drivers when available...so does Dell have the drivers already (or is SLI not enabled yet on the XPS M1730 either)?

 

With 400 GB total, it's going to be RAID 0 (striped drives). RAID 1 would be a mirrored drive, giving you 200GB total.

You should be able to call and request an alternate configuration. They could have just changed the configuration because a single-drive configuration wasn't selling very much.

If you purchase it with SLI cards, that should mean they've got SLI working (it would be deceptive advertising, otherwise). Again, though, you may want to call Dell directly. I know that Clevo has released SLI-compatible drivers for Vista 64, so I don't see why Alienware would be behind the curve on this, but Dell should have it working if they advertise it.

 

SLI support still isn't completely smoothed out Vista, but it's working.

 

Is RAID-0 dangerous and realistically more likely to result in a hard drive crash than just a single non-RAID drive? I like the idea of a performance boost and greater capacity from RAID-0 but does the extra hard drive and read/write operations mean a greater chance of 1 of the 2 hard drives crashing (thus resulting in the whole thing going down)?

 

Raid 0 gives higher performance, but it the performance benefit isn't really that huge. You may see a 10 to 20% peformance increase. Maybe. Furthermore, on a laptop, the RAID is powered by the processor as opposed to dedicated hardware RAID (which is also much faster).

The bad side is that if one of the drives in RAID 0 die you're going to lose your data on both drives. It increases the risk of a fatal crash, but the damage can be reduced by constant backups.

RAID on a laptop is a nifty feature, but I think it's a feature that's better on a spec sheet than it is in actual performance.

 

I'd say it's no more likely to result in a crash than a single drive, but if a crash DOES happen on either drive, you're kind of screwed out of all your data because of the way it distributes data. I prefer going non-RAID, just because I know that, whether or not I've made a backup, at least half of my data is fine if one drive crashes.