Best RAM and Fastest HD for XPS M1730?

Hello,

I'm looking to upgrade my current HD and RAM in my XPS M1730. I want the best/fastest of both. Any recommendations?

Thx

 

your motherboard can't handle anything faster than 667mhz RAM, so SO-DIMM PC5300 200pin DDR2 RAM with 667mhz is what you're looking for.

as for the drives, SSDs are definitely the way to go if you want the absolute best - two 256GB SSDs in Raid 0 will be smoking fast.

 

Best solid state drive you could get: http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/...9&cs=19&c=us&l=en&dgc=SS&cid=27530&lid=627063

 

Officially the M1730 supports up to 4GB of memory. Like Whizzo mentioned, it will only support memory speeds up to 667MHz, so 2 x 2GB of PC5300 is probably the best thing you can get. Some 800MHz memory may give you better timings when running at 667MHz, but the gain in performance is imperceptible.

I beg to differ. While the above Samsung (and all Samsungs, really) are solid drives, the best overall performers right now are still the Intel X25-M and X25-E.

 

$750 is slightly over budget I was looking to spend $300 at a maximum.

Is this any good? http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI....m=260366320748&ssPageName=STRK:MEWA:IT&ih=016

thx for the replies guys

 

I saw your PM, and no that seagate is not a good drive, especially for that price. Newegg had it for around $140, which was a good deal. I would not pay $60 more to get a potentially reboxed one sold as new on ebay.
The 7200.4 series is getting mixed reviews. Some say it is great, others have problems. With the current stats being 3 dead out of ~26 drives, their seems to be a problem with it, or at least with the first batch, which is why most etailers are waiting for the second batch of drives from seagate.

I personally would not buy one with those stats,
I would take a slightly slower Hitachi 7K320 or WD3200BEKT over that seagate because they have proven to be very reliable, and they offer a higher bang for the buck. You can get a 320gb 7200rpm Hitachi 7K320 for $50 after rebate on zipzoomfly, which is an amazing deal. Put two in RAID 0, and spend $100 and you have a drive much better than the seagate 7200.4, for half the price

K-TRON

 

Hey Ktron,

what is a RAID 0, alo how can I tell how fast my current RAM is?

unfortunately zoomfly only ship to the US and I live in the UK.

 

Download CPU-Z. Google RAID 0.

 

You can see current ram speed in the memory tab of CPU-Z. Your system will perform best with PC5300 memory running at 667MHz.

RAID is used for multiple hard drive applications. RAID 0 means that two or more hard drives are installed in a system which cooperate with each other. So when a file is written, part is on each drive, so loading times are faster. The XPS1730 has a software based raid controller made by Intel, so it will be add about 10% more harddrive speed to your system when two drives are installed. So if you install one drive which does 60mb/sec, in synthetic tests it will show 120mb/sec with 2 drives, and in real performance, it will show around 70mb/sec data transfer. So their is a performance increase with software raid. It is not the fastest thing out their, but its additional performance.

You may want to try span, they ship to UK. There must be other places, but I am not aware of them.
http://www.span.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=23_512_630&products_id=22046

more selection:
http://www.span.com/catalog/index.php?cPath=23_512

Everything is more expensive in Europe. If there was a way for you to buy it on zipzoomfly and ship it to me, I would be more than happy to ship it to you in Europe

K-TRON

 

my comp has 2 micron 333mhz pc2-5300 memory cards - I guess this is already the best I can get?

 

if they are 2GB each, yeah, that's as fast as it'll go.

 

I just bought a Hitachi 7K320 320GB. I don't know how to install two of them in RAID0 and I'm happy with 320GB storage.

Thanks for all the help guys.

 

You should not have bought the drives yet,
I am looking at your hdtune picture, and it looks like you have a ton of processes running in the background giving you the 7mb/sec average speed.

You should go to the run command, type in MSCONFIG
Go to the services and startup tab and disable everything.
Than rerun the hdtune, it should be performing much better.

If your drive still performs terribly, your drive may be in PIO mode,
Go into device manager, and uninstall the SATA driver. Windows will automatically reinstall the driver, and that will put the drive back in DMA mode.

Its between post 13 and 15

K-TRON

 

2x2gb G.Skill PC6400 SODIMMs + 2x Intel X25-E SSDs =

 

800Mhz memory won't do anything noticeable, even if it'll run at lower cas latency, and g.skill or not, brand doesn't matter ! Though 2x2GB would be better than 2x1GB if you use alot of memory.