Inspiron 7720 : OS on the msata drive

Hi all,

I have recently purchased an Inspiron 17R SE from the Dell outlet (very good deal) and thus did not have any opportunity to customise the system (as expected).

The system will arrive with 2x 1TB 5400 drives and I want to take advantage of SSD performance. I was thinking of purchasing a 128GB or 256GB msata drive to use for the OS. Now I have read many forums and getting mixed feedback - some are saying it can only be used for cache whilst others say it "can" be done.

So I ask, is anyone out there currently booting their OS from the msata drive?

Thanks in advance!

 

Hi,

You may install the Windows on the MSATA Hard Drives and make the system perform faster. After receiving the system please ensure that there are no MSATA dives detected in BIOS. If there is a MSATA installed and detected in BIOS, before changing the MSATA and installing the Windows you will have to open the “Intel rapid storage technology” application then “disable” the acceleration.

I hope this helps. Please do write back in case you need any further assistance.

Thanks and Regards,
Swapnajan M C
#iworkfordell

 

Many thanks for your reply and sorry for the late acknowledgment.

When I receive the laptop and install/boot the OS from the mSATA I will post my results.

 

OK so I received my mSATA 256GB drive today and installed it. Booted the machine and cloned my Windows partition onto the mSATA drive, then removed the primary disk from the laptop. After I restarted the machine, I went into the BIOS and there was no option to have the mSATA drive as a boot device. The machine is set to AHCI mode so this shouldn't be a problem.

I tried everything and have come to the conclusion that Dell have not intended the mSATA drive to be a boot device and used solely for caching, thus it is not a bootable option.

Dell's technical support staff who I spoke too over the phone clearly wasn't technical after having reassured me a number of times (after clarifying with him constantly) that the mSATA drive can indeed be booted from.

 

I'm pretty sure I've read somewhere on this forum that booting from the msata drive is possible. Try switching from AHCI to the Intel Rapid Storage mode (? not sure what it's called in the BIOS). If I remember correctly, in ATA or AHCI mode the msata drive is not available, hence it would not show up in the list of boot devices.

 

I really struggled with this too and almost gave up.

I cloned my system drive to the MSATA just like you. However, the MSATA did NOT show up in the BIOS boot list and I could not determine a way to make it show up. So much for that!

Almost ready to give up, I tried a scratch install of windows7, booting from the DVD. Lo and behold, the MSATA showed up as an eligible install drive..and the install worked! If you do this, keep your original install disk around until AFTER the install. I was able to reinstall many missing drivers by having windows search my original configuration.

After running some benchmarks on the MSATA install, I noticed slower speeds than I anticipated. After some research, it turns out that MSATA port is only a SATA II device. Therefore, your speeds will be capped to the SATA II maximum ( 300 MB/S ). Not a big deal for me though.

 

In order to successfully run Windows 7 (or 8 I'll assume) from the mSATA on the 17r SE you must update your bios to A08, set your boot priority to UEFI and switch to AHCI mode. Mine wouldn't boot to the OS on the mSATA either until I did this and now it works flawlessly. Note that updating to A08 is what enables the UEFI option as that is missing in A03 which is what my laptop came with.

If you install Win7 to the 32gb one that comes with it though make sure you shrink or delete the page file and system restore, disable hibernation and move the user docs/temp internet files to your HDD. Win7 will run perfectly on the 32gb mSATA by itself, after doing the above I have around 16gb free.

 

Could you elaborate on this? First of all, I have BIOS A08 and now have no drives in the laptop (except the mSATA one). I've set the BIOS to UEFI, but do I keep 'Load Legacy Option Rom' enabled or disabled?

When disabled, I can't see my original Windows 7 x64 DVD. Also, my Windows 7 USB stick won't boot. What exactly do I do now? I can select 'Add Boot Option' and then it spins the DVD and I can create an entry that boots the Windows 7 DVD. Unfortunately, it 'hangs' on the 'starting Windows' screen every single time, so I can't install at all. If I don't put the Windows 7 DVD in, the Windows 7 install I did with 'legacy boot' can't be found by the BIOS. When I select 'Add Boot Option' it tells me "No filesystem found".

Could you please explain exactly what you did step by step? I'm no newbie when it comes to computers, but this just puzzles me.

 

Okay, for anyone else reading this: In my case, the mSata port works fine!

What I had to do:

- Set UEFI to default in BIOS
- Set 'Enable Legacy Option ROM' to True
- Set the SATA mode to AHCI
- Follow the instructions in this thread to create a UEFI compatible, bootable Windows 7 USB stick
- Install Windows 7 on the mSATA drive without any additional SATA harddisk attached
- As soon as the Windows 7 installer does its first reboot, shut down the laptop, add an additional SATA harddisk, and power up the laptop.
- Enjoy Windows 7 on your mSATA

Hope this helps anyone

 

I have no doubt your method works. However, after setting thy SATA mode to AHCI, I successfully installed Win7 to the MSATA just fine using the Dell Win7 DVD that shipped with the system.

 

Are you using 'old' BIOS or UEFI? I'm asking because with regular BIOS I could install to the mSATA just fine as well, but Windows would put boot files on a regular HDD drive (one that can be selected as bootable from the BIOS), because the mSATA isn't selectable as a boot device in the regular BIOS. As soon as I swapped the regular HDD, the mSATA would no longer boot because boot files were missing.

Have you tried removing the regular harddisks to see if your system still boots?

 

I think he meant he had no problem installing from the dvd nor did I. All I had to do was hit F12 to select the dvd drive and it installed just fine. I did however use the advanced disk configuration to partition/format the mSATA when choosing the disk to install it to and that automatically created the 100mb boot partition on the mSATA at the same time.

 

Is there any chance the particular mSATA drive you're using is only capable of SATA II speeds? I'm trying to decide on whether or not to pick up a Samsung 830 Series drive, rather than a Crucial mSATA 6gb/s drive. Please help, thanks!

 

As you can see in my system screenshot, the mSATA drive is limited to SATA2 speeds.

However, as an OS drive, my personal opinion is that access times are far more important than raw throughput. For an OS drive, you'll need many small read/write/seek operations to be done efficiently, you'll likely never transfer large enough files to utilize SATA3 speeds. I currently have a Samsung 128GB mSATA drive as boot/os, and two 1TB 5400rpm harddisks for data storage in RAID1, which also gives a small read boost (write is a bit slower, ofcourse).

 

Hi,
I also get an Inspiron 17R SE laptop what's strange is that HWiNFO64 shows only integrated INTEL HD4000 instead of Geforce GT650M as in previous screenshot made by Redah, maybe there's somewhere a tool to switch between graphic card (as it was in my previous HP notebook with ATI/Intel card) ?

Thx

 

Any particular mSATA drives you guys using? I just received my Inspiron 17R the other day and I'm planning to do this setup also since mine came with 2x 1.0TB drives. Planning to put the OS on the mSATA drive if that's possible. However with the limited number of choices of mSATA drives I think I'll purchase the 128GB Crucial M4 mSATA

 

Hi Redah

I have a new Dell 7520 with the i7 3612QM processor and the 32GB mSATA SSD onboard. I have been lees than impressed with the performance of the machine so was most interested to read this post.

I followed your instructions, removing my 1T drive and doing the fresh Windows (8) install to the SSD. I re-fitted the 1T drive as instructed at the first reboot and this is where things started to go sideways as it tried to boot off the old (win7) disk and Blue-screened. So my question is... when you say "Add the additional SATA disk" would you be meaning a blank non-bootable disk? Would my old win7 hard disk stop the Win8 SSD install booting like this?

I'm gonna try again tonight with a blang SATA drive and see if that makes any difference.

I was 'lost in the woods' for quite a while getting my old disk working again, but I must say, during the brief time I used Win8 on the SSD alone, I was SUPER-IMPRESSED with the performance. About 8 sec from power-on to working (and that includes entering my paasswd) so thanks for the info.

Cheers, John

 

I find it strange that anyone would try to install Windows on a 32GB Sata2 drive intended for a cache?
As the machine has 2 bays, I will install a Sata3 128GB Samsung SSD in bay1, move the original HDD to bay2, and use the mSata as a normal (fast) hard drive for apps like Office, PhotoShop, etc.
This means I can use ACHI & retain TRIM on the SSD, plus have fast reads for apps accessed on the mSata (won't need to write much there so Intel RST not needed), and use the HDD for data.
Granted the HDD will be a little slower being only 5,400rpm, but the speed of the SSD will more than make up for this overall.
Not sure what my BIOS will be, maybe A08, but I heard that anything high than this has issues, so I will leave it alone for now.