Soo 480-512GB drives....need advice

I am regretfully considering just buying a 480-512GB SSD in the future because i figure at the current price it wont be dropping too much in the near future and constantly waiting to get this is probably going to just hurt me more over the long run than just buying it now. (as in the price difference really wont be much and the benefits of having it will out weight the savings of waiting another 6-12 months) What are your guy's/gal's opinions on 480-512GB prices and what are current price ranges? I have seen 350 for good 480-512GB drives before and i am wondering if anyone knows when they go on sale and where and when i should keep my eyes open for it. I know buy.com newegg and amazon are the 3 main places that have good prices. Any models i should put on the watch list and what should be my target prices? Also i would really like to get one that is hardware encrypted. That is very important to me since it'll go in my R4. Also if i can get a 7mm one that would be a plus but not a big deal. Down the road i would through it in my netbook or in an ultrabook whenever i buy one in a year or two.

As always thanks for the help!

HF



samsung 840 regular is $354.99...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147190

whats the difference from KW and BW

I see the difference between pro and non pro...its 3 vs 5 year warranty and much faster speeds, which for 150 dollar difference i could careless ^^

found it at B&H for $327
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=&sku=897032&Q=&is=REG&A=details

anything on B&H return policy if defective? are they easy like amazon or a total pain in the keester like newegg?

 

Wait.

M500.

February.

960GB - <$600.

I think whatever you buy now (possibly with as little as two weeks to wait) will be regrettable.

No substitution for capacity - and as for hardware encrypted?

See:
AnandTech - Micron/Crucial Announces M500 SSD Line of SSDs

 

As you pretty clearly already know, a couple weeks ago Amazon put the 512GB M4 on sale at $350. One day, or at most two and then that disappeared.

Odds are that that was the 9.5mm thick M4.

For the 7mm thick M4 you'll likely have to pay a somewhat higher price.

I got my 512GB M4 (9.5mm thick) from a 3rd party Amazon vendor for $374 total and am not too worried that I missed out on saving another $24 with the very short Amazon deal.

FWIW I frankly don't see much price action until the new Crucial M500 series SSDs shows up (max of 960GB) in another few months.

 

please check my update i found samsung 500GB for 327 and that seems like a great price from what i know. meh a 960GB drive for less than 600 in February is totally out of my price range. My price range is 256GB but i might as well get a 500GB drive for 327. Also whether my idea takes off or i get a job i can always through my 500GB in my netbook and upgrade ^^ What are your opinions on the 840 500GB for 327 from B&H photo? It has 256bit encryption

i mean if in 1 month a 500/512GB samsung or crucial will be less than 300 i'll wait but let me know ^^

 

Nobody knows (to tell you to wait) - but yes the new Crucial M500 480GB models will/should be around $300 for more performance (real world, expected) than the current Samsung models. Along with 7mm z-height and the encryption you want - not to mention the capacitors to provide a power backup along with superior low power usage, etc.

How long have you been waiting till now? Will it really make a difference to wait (and save for) another month or so?

 

another month is no issue....another 6 would be annoying. been waiting ever since we had the 830s go for 155-180 6-12 months ago...been fairly broke but figured its a worthy investment and might as well buy it since the amount of time i use a computer the cumulative time savings of an SSD will pay off in no time

also from what i was the 840 have crazy ideal and equal speeds and i know samsungs are extremely good but so are crucials m series


EDIT: i stand corrected the m500s are slightly faster minus reads

EDIT number 2 ^^: Umm the samsung though does have 20 extra GBs though they do some in ~same dollar for dollar comparing 327 to 300. Also what is the max you can fill an SSD without batching TRIM?

ok tiller answer this one...whats the difference exactly from GiB and GB...or are they the same? so 500GB vs 480GiB? and the whole 7.5 % spare space vs 14.5%? i assume that is the spare space for TRIM right and to have extra just in cast some parts of SSD fail right? I am a little fuzzy on SSD knowledge.

Well saw these charts....lol wow
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6553/sandisk-ultra-plus-ssd-review-256gb/4

Also @tiller....the 480GiB one is mSATA????

EDIT: sorry i am a major tard today with reading.....-_- I see 512GiB raw and 480GB user access -_- my apologies I can't read today. (arguably most days ^^)

 

GiB vs. GB or not the same.

GB is used by manufacturers to sell us a '500' GB drive but that capacity is actually closer to:

Nominal Capacity x 0.9313225746154785 (which is the 1,000,000,000 'advertised' divided by 1,073,741,824 bytes that should be there - (1024x3)).

To confuse things more: in HDD's the 'calculation' is exactly as above - the manufacturers give us 500,000,000,000 / 1024 / 1024 / 1024 = ~465 GiB of actual usable capacity.

With SSD's: the nand chips are in GiB's but the difference between GB and GiB's are used for spare area - any (small) remaining amount is simply accounted for by the formatting of the drive.


Spare Area is technically not needed for GC and TRIM to work - but in real world use - without it; the USER sees performance drop off a cliff.


Spare Area as programmed by the SSD's firmware is necessary to achieve the advertised speeds - but these speeds are only possible if/when the SSD's nand is new/clean and empty.

As we fill and use (us or the O/S or our Programs - same thing) the nand chips with data - the speeds slow to a steady-state value (this is what should be advertised, imo). If, as in my case I hammer the drive at this point - the performance sinks to the floor (and why you may have seen my posts that SSD's can be below HDD speeds).


By leaving additional 'unallocated' space we prevent these slowdowns from becoming show stoppers (search for a recent thread where the SSD was 'pausing' for a minute or so - simply by being filled).

Also keep in mind that GC and TRIM routines are not created equal between SSD manufacturer's, controllers or even between models (with different quality/generation/quantity nand chips).

GC can be aggressive or passive (this is entirely up to the Firmware) or anything in between and which we have no control over (except by our purchase decision). Better to be towards the aggressive end than the passive end (but with less free space and/or extra spare area - this aggressive GC can increase WA and potentially affect the longevity of the SSD).

TRIM is also a variable that we have no control over (unless our SSD manufacturer provides a toolbox with a manual TRIM function - even then we have to wait (at idle) for TRIM to actually complete and or even kick in).

When the O/S sends a TRIM command; the SSD takes it into consideration - and will operate on it if/when it deems necessary. But not necessarily right when the TRIM command was received (again: no real control).


Don't go by rated spec's when comparing SSD's - the only measurement (that matters) is real world use.


See:
Samsung 840 Pro SSD 256 GB Review | techPowerUp

Even the current benchmark 'score' champion is only 2% faster according to the review above - but look to see how close (or not) the M4 (at just 128GB capacity) is with benchmark 'scores' way below anything current.

After that has sunk in a little...


Consider that the Samsung 840 Pro is second worst to the Plextor M5 Pro Xtreme when it comes to consistency - how does consistency affect users? - By the 'pauses' that happen when every few IOP's, the drive reaches maximum (worst) latency because it's Firmware, GC and TRIM routines (along with any dedicated spare area) is not optimized for performance over time (sustained...).

See:
AnandTech - Plextor Updates The Firmware on M5 Pro: Promises Increased Performance, We Test It



See bottom graph and note that the majority of the Plextor data points are mostly on the bottom of the x-axis.



Of all the SSD's I've personally played/used/bought with - the Intel 520 Series 240GB and the Crucial M4 512GB (when bigger capacity required) are the only two worth buying.

The SanDisk Extreme 240GB SSD is also a contender - but not for my workstations - simply on price/performance (close to the Intel 520 Series for about $100 less) minus a 'real' SSD Toolbox.


Hope you liked your crash course?


Keep reading and saving - the SSD's won't go away - and when they do finally 'arrive' - I hope I am right when I predict that the capacity will be easily over 1TB 'usable' and larger and the poor SATA3 ports will have faded to a distant memory of how storage sub-systems used to be attached to our platforms.



Hope some of the above helps?

 

interesting i thought GB was using 1024 digital number but manufactures were just shaddy/lazy and rounded it.....also if i understand correctly from what you said since it has a good chunk of spare space filling up the drive will not kill it like in the old days? If i am mistaken sorry in starbucks and trying to wrap up since i got to leave in a few to get wife. I'll definitely read it again later when not so much is going on so it can sink in

 

so been almost a month. Tiller have you seen anything new on the news about the m500? I have googled every week or so and still see nothing new but just making sure i haven't missed anything.

 

The closest thing I found was the announcement that Micron have taped out the 128Gb NAND cells. Micron Introduces Industry's Smallest 128-Gigabit NAND Flash Device | techPowerUp
This is however TLC which has a significant disadvantage in P/E cycles (only 1000 thereabouts) and reprogramming time (ie. write latency).
I'm guessing that in order to affordably offer 960Gb, (actual capacity is about 1024Gb of NAND when accounting for overprovision), Micron would need to use 16 units of 64Gb MLC flash (128Gb are not yet on the horizon) which I doubt they may be able to price very much below $600 even considering that they own the fabs. However, more likely is that they would use 8 units of the 128Gb TLC NAND in which the <$600 price is much more feasible, however, the disadvantages of TLC stands.
I couldn't wait so I went ahead with the 256Gb 840Pro and never looked back.

 

Yeah, no news yet on the M500 - but even if they were available, I would still be waiting for a review from Anand before I jumped this time.

 

Just note that those P/E cycles are purely theoretical worse case, almost like MTBF. Those numbers have been proven not true (and much longer) by the real world testing done on SSD's. Even then with 1000 cycles on a 960GB SSD, do the math. If you wrote 960GB (assuming WA of 1 and even wear leveling) every day which is very unlikely, you'd get nearly 3 years of use at worse case. The usage scenario with such drives are likely to be less than 10% of that which is still 96GB of data WRITTEN every day. That's a lot, and last you 30 years. I think 5 years is a resonable expectation for a consumer drive imho. I wouldn't trust any of my hard drives over 5 years old either.

 

didn't someone say the m4 was only good for 72 TBs earlier? For some reason i am remember that number but no clue where i am getting this from besides reading it on here or at least i thought i did.

 

This article says that the M500 will use MLC
AnandTech - Micron/Crucial Announces M500 SSD Line of SSDs

 

I will tip my hat to them if they can price 1024gb of MLC Nand with a modern controller for less than $600
TLC is looking to be quite good for archival types of storage where p/e cycles don't matter very much and write speed isn't so critical , it will probably end up taking the role of 5400rpm drives we have now.

 

Yeah; if this was TLC nand I would not be as interested in this drive as I am now.

MLC, superior (vs. M4 and hopefully in real world usage too - just like the M4...) performance and capacities that reflect modern workloads that can actually use and need fast storage that SSD's have been promising for so long.

If Crucial is offering this in the next few weeks - what is Intel and/or Samsung going to offer I'm wondering?

Next year should be interesting with possibly non SATA/mSATA storage solutions, 'real' 5th generation SSD performance and Intel's latest and greatest cpu's announced and hopefully available to actually buy.

Large, high capacity TLC nand may very well be placed into the role of current 5400 RPM drives in the future - but in my case: that means that they will never see them being incorporated into any of my systems (if I want that level of performance and much better longevity - I will buy HDD's thank you).

 

According to this: SSD Write Endurance 25nm Vs 34nm

64GB Crucial M4 ran 768.57 TB, that's 12000 w/e assuming WA of 1 and even wear leveling. Larger drives will obviously write more data because it has more cells.

And the Samsung 840 uses TLC, so far it's testing well: http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/5...-endurance-testing-tlc-to-the-end/index3.html

I guess you could consider it the 5400RPM drive, but it's still significantly faster than what any hard drive can manage today.

 

Just want to expand my answer in my post immediately above:

When I mean much better longevity, I am referring to the fact that a HDD can keep it's data for 10 - 20 years and still be readable (if stored properly, of course) vs. SSD's that only guarantee 1 year readability if not actively powered/used during that year.

Sure - performance of even TLC nand is higher than HDD's when both are used in 'long term storage' mode - but the only performance metric that matters for 'long term storage' mode is being able to get your data again period. Especially if like me you load data onto drives, remove/store the drive in question and then maybe need to access some data from that week (or date range) sometime in the not too near future.

While even TLC nand will post 'phenomenal' endurance vs. what is marketed/guaranteed in total TB written - that is not the most common use of large 'near line' storage of data as explained above - and as far as I know; nobody has tested that aspect of SSD endurance either (even if they do - the drive in question would not be the drive to buy at that 12-18 month later window anyhow).

 

I never knew about this. Where can I read some good articles about the exact details of this issue?

 

Good articles? No, like I said anything that gets tested properly is not likely to be considered for purchase ~18 months later (newer drives will be available, of course).

But try this:

See:
http://www.jedec.org/sites/default/files/Alvin_Cox [Compatibility Mode]_0.pdf


See:
AnandTech - The Intel SSD 710 (200GB) Review


Anand Lal Shimpi said:

 

Although that presentation says: " A solid state drive (SSD) is a non-volatile storage device"

Which according to this 1 year storage is not the case. Although I find this interesting to say the least and good to know. So does it just lose data or does the drive become unusable after that time? I left an Intel X25-M sitting around for probably a year and it worked just fine. I'm sure it varies from SSD to SSD.

 

How I understand it: the drive's data must be able to be read at least a year later with no power connections to the drive during the year.

Nobody has made these kind of tests for various drives (SSD's) as far as I know except internally (and where they most likely base their warranties from).

This is why I give my old SSD's away (rather than have them sit unused) like I do with HDD's.

SSD's really are a 'temporary ownership' item in my opinion.

 

i would have to concur. I can't wait for the day i got the time and money to make an 8 bay raid 5 3/4TB file server that is encrypted ^^

 

I'm finding my desktop 7200RPM HDD's are more than adequate for server file storage. I can get a solid 100MB/sec over my gigabit ethernet and wouldn't need to ask for anything more, well until we get terabit ethernet, lol. Although I have been tempted to upgrade to 2000 MBps ethernet but that would mean two routers and three switches would need to be updated too. Not to mention I may need to update to Cat 6 cable as all I have now is Cat 5e.

RAID 5 is wholly unnecessary for a home or small office environment unless you have a lot of real-time data on a daily basis that you'd risk losing. A decent hardware RAID card would cost hundreds of dollars, if not over a thousand, for a solid 8 drive RAID 5 array. That being said, if I had thousands of dollars to spare, I would probably do the same thing.

 

you mean 10Gbit right? 2000? never heard of that speed. If you are going to upgrade you might as well make a fiber home network ^^ When ever my wife and i get our own house i would love to do that.

I don't know about decent but rosewill sells a decent rated 8 bay system for 250. It has good rating but the PSU was the most likely think to crash. Reason for 7200 rpm is more so for rebuilding and access times. Best a GB network can do is 120MBps and that is at best so an 8 drive system would saturate that instantly. Hell most single drives saturate that already. My 1TB does 140MBps on outer platter. Never got around to test my 3TB one. I am sure it is 160 if not higher. Problem is with the hardrives inner platters drop to 60-70MBps. Maybe new 3TB drives will bottom out at 80-100. I should test my 3 TB some time with sisoft.


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816132016

here you go and it is on sale again. Go buy and save all those legally burned movies ^^

Question does that eSATA port mean you can plug the system to a computer? because that is what i would do. have it network connected but also eSATA to my main computer for speed ^^ I oogled over this for like 6 months wanting to buy it 2 years ago but than the floods happened and i said well never mind on that.

 

Those controller cards are awful. They're not hardware controllers, they *require* connection to a PC. It's not an independent NAS and requires connection to the PC through a controller card for the PC to manage the array. You need a very fast CPU and fast drives for any array to work properly. You're better off getting an SAS card and using Windows built-in RAID, and for RAID 1 only. I will never trust RAID again unless done using enterprise class hard drives and a true hardware RAID controller.

See my post on my WHS build here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/off...-bit-bullet-bought-my-new-whs-2011-build.html

 

so the Samsung 840 500GB is going for 280...should i just get it? Is there really a reason to wait at that point? Is the performance boost worth the wait? Is it really noticeable in real world usage? Is there any other difference besides speed i should note....i forget if there is

Newegg.com - Official Newegg Promo Codes, Coupon Code, Coupons, Discounts, Promotions, Free Shipping Codes

SAMSUNG 840 Series MZ-7TD500BW Solid State Drive - Newegg.com

EDIT: sorry i am ignorant...840 uses TLC and doesn't the new m500 also use that? Also does the 840 allow encryption and does the R4 support that? I thought both did but i am blanking.

EDIT: i are tard...840 has encryption. Now does the R4 support that because i heard the hard drive encryption requires motherboard support. Also how do i check to see if my samsung netbook reports hardrive encryption.

 

$280 for a 500GB Samsung 840 strikes me as pretty competitive, at least for right now.

IIRC the new Crucial M500 SSD has 20nm MLC NAND.

And when the new Crucial M500 does show up for sale (another month or three?), it's likely to sell at a price premium for at least a while.

I have the money, but it's not burning a hole in my pocket.

Meaning that I'm waiting for the M500 and a few reviews...

 

Stick with Samsung. Their products are 100% genuine; designed, installed and manufactured in Korea. Note: The 840 series RAID controller has had issues with the Alienware M18x R2, not sure why, but these SSD's would not RAID. Keep that in mind for the future.

I've tested four 840 Pro's and had issues with all of them - not individually, but when in RAID. Individually, these SSD's were quite amazing, especially in efficiency. The system lasted at least 45 minutes longer. As for performance, they are very similar to the 830. Speaking in regards to durability, we can't be certain yet. But the 830 has held its own for quite some time.

 

my windows is all messed up on my R4 because i botched driver install...didn't know you have to do dell first than amd drivers :/ so i need to reinstall but don't want to waste a whole day reinstalling and than do it again when i buy an SSD in a month or two. so i am kinda drawn between just getting that now. How much better is that MLC? for performance and endurance? the TLC has 1000 right now but what does 20nm MLC last? wasn't it like 2000?

man standard 840 for 280...i am itching to buy...tiller where are you!

EDIT: 25nm is 3000 and it appears that a 32nm was 5000 so what kind of drop is a 20nm?

The performance of the 500GB 840 is nearly the same as the m500 so i really see little benefit from waiting minus the fact that the worse case study by anandtech shows a huge difference but still i am more interested in the endurance. If they released a damn date for release date. It would at least give me an idea if waiting is worth while but if it will be May they finally release it i will just buy this.

 

OK, I'm going to be very much in the minority on this one, but I have had tremendous success with the OCZ Vertex 4. The drive is consistent, fast, and actually manageable on a Mac because OCZ has made a bootable tools suite for it, which includes the ability to do firmware updates and a proper ATA secure erase. The latter function is much more complicated to do on a Mac with other SSD brands.

 

i'll kindly pass but that is awesome it works great for you...maybe in a year or two when they show a good history of being a good company i'll consider them.

 

Technically, well binned 20nm chips should last at least 3000cycles (see intel 335). Im inclined to agree on the 2000 cycle prediction for the micron mlc as it is a more budget drive. Im intending to use the 500GB 840 drive as an external or a steam games library so the slow write doesn't really matter

 

psh 85-300MBps write is good with me ^^ i don't really see a huge real world difference at least what i do...i could be wrong but yea.

 

well i am going to go and buy the 500GB 840 for 280 since i really don't want and can't wait for the m500 unless tiller shows up and sways me from buying it within the hour. I am wondering on what i'll need to do to make it perform better. Anandtech had that review where 25% spare space gave very consistent performance. I wonder if it would make this drive better and also help increase its life span. I was thinking limiting it to 480GB worth of space. Any thoughts and how i would do this?

AnandTech - SanDisk Ultra Plus SSD Review (256GB)

this is what i am referring to

Only issue i got with this drive is that according to hardcoreOC or whatever is that the steady performance over time degrades faster than others....not sure what that means exactly but i thick that was referring to its performance of the life of the drive.

I can foresee myself using ~50GB per day over time with what i do so ~3 years for the drive will work for me. by that time i'll upgrade. I'll just have to stop my paranoid weekly/random secure 3x erase :/

 

Don't fret over performance loss. ALL ssds lose performance as you fill them up, similar to HDD except the drop off is nowhere near. The Samsung 840 has a very aggressive garbage collection scheme so it is unlikely to degrade due to usage, especially if your OS has TRIM. Performance consistency is really only important with enterprise workloads or stuff like Databases where realtime latency is paramount. Consumers tend to require better peak performance (often at the cost of lower steady state performance).
Performance consistency just basically means how the SSD sustains its speed as it is continuously hammered with write requests (basically how well the controller juggles garbage collection vs allowing NAND to be written at the same time). If GC is too lax then consistency is great until you run out of NAND thereby the performance drops like a brick with massive dips. If GC is too aggressive then steady state performance is either low or progressively gets lower.
The 840 has crap steady state performance with decent consistency due to the slow reprogram time of the TLC NAND.

 

STOP WORRYING ABOUT LIFESPAN! Sheesh. It's still not an issue, especially with a 500GB HDD. And performance won't degrade much at all. It's write performance that degrades anyhow, and unless you do LOTS of writes to your SSD, it doesn't much matter. Overprovision if you wish, but I still say it's not necessary. Tiller speaks the truth when it comes to degradation and performance for significant amount of writes on a daily basis. But again, he's speaking from an extreme user perspective and not your normal use day to day that most of us do. Even with 1000 P/E cycles, at 500GB even if you WRITE 50GB a day, that's 27 years at 1:1 W/A. Even half or quarter of that, it's 8-13 years.

If you're that paranoid then buy an enterprise drive or a at least an MLC drive.

 

weird when i was looking at another table on anandtech i thought i was ~ at the 3 year mark with a 1000P/E and 50 GB a day

 

AnandTech is looking at the worst case scenario with a write amplification factor of 10, which is nowhere near what consumer workloads place. Especially if it is to be a storage ssd. The 500GB of flash does much to absorb the writes. You also gotta know that flash cels typically last at least twice their rates p/e cycles according to the testing on xtremetech. Plus this is some of Samsung's finest Nand we're talking about

 

awesome thanks! I'll stick to assuming it will last 3 years if that since everything i own blows up into my face ^^ Watch the damn thing breaks in 3 months -_-

 

BTW it should land tomorrow ^^
EDIT: Well it has arived and i got one question...what do i do with this software? I am doing fresh install so can i just plug it in and reinstall everything? Do i need to install an SSD software for TRIM? I am using win 7 home premium

 

Well i got it and have everything installed. I honestly do not see a huge difference in boot times surprisingly. Takes ~25s to boot up (I thought i was at worse case 50s before). For being magnitudes faster I figured it would be more. Also in the R4 it has raid enables and starts with this raid screen and than just continues on. I went in BIOS and it has ACHI and ATA for other options, which do i select? Though i will say word opens almost instantly now...that program was so damn slow and now it just loads ^^ Also what is up with it having such low 4K vs 4k qd32? I thought qd32 took more time? Also why are the rights better for 4k than reads?

840


Old 500GB 7200rpm Hitachi drive.



Just for fun here i my 3TB external that i would use for my steam account since it is over 2TB of games but steam refuses to let the multi drive thing work so it is doing nothing -_-





It just tops 200MBps on outer platter ^^

 

That's normal, and the BIOS should be set to AHCI. Don't change it after you already installed everything. The BIOS should have AHCI set before installation of the SSD. The discs that come with the SSD - ignore them.

 

OK, I see bits and pieces here and there in these threads, and I think most people posting here are well versed enough in SSDs that they assume everyone knows certain things (I don't mean that to sound negative, BTW.)

Is there a simple "So you got a new SSD to install in an existing system - here is a step by step SSD install for dummies" guide? For example, my case: I will have a new M17x with a 750GB HD + 64G mSata cache drive and Windows 7 already installed, and a 512GB 840 Pro showing up the next day. What is the step by step process I should take for the best install?

 

So what are you planning on doing with the 750GB HDD? Replacing it with the 500GB 840 Pro? If so, get rid of the 64GB mSATA, or at least don't use it as a cache drive it will actually give less performance than the Samsung 840.

 

if i were him i would use the 64GB mSATA drive as a install drive ^^ Put all the programs you will install on that and go from there. It'll speed up installs. Also can't you use it as a cache for just the hardrive? Anyways i already got it install but it is on raid. I'll just switch to ACHI...i don't think anything bad will happen. Never even knew the BIOS had that setup prior...oh well. I hope i can get steam to do multiple drives this time. Through a good 200-300GB of games on the SSD and another 300-400GB on the other. Then the rest gets through onto the external drive ^^.

BTW does the software include the stuff that lets me see how much wear i have put on the SSD?

 

The 750 GB HDD will remain as mainly just a storage drive. I do a lot of video editing, so I'll keep files there until I need to work with them, then move them to the SSD (where my video editing program will reside.) So the 750 GB drive will be a "misc storage drive" and the 512GB SSD will be for Windows and the programs I use the most. The 64 GB mSata cache drive will be used only as a cache drive for the 750 GB HDD - my understanding is that it will not be in play when I'm using the SSD.

 

well since a few people are posting here and i really don't want to make a new thread for probably something stupid...so here we go.

I put into the R4 a while ago 16GB of ram and put the old 6GBs worth of RAM under the keyboard. It had some statement only for quad cores, which i have a 3720qm and when i turned it on i see 22GB installed but only 16GB usable....what gives?

 

well f.....switching to achi was a bad idea.......Back to square one with a new fresh install since some dumb moron at dell wanted to enable raid when there is only one hardrive in it....i want ACHI right? not ATA? Why the hell would they enable raid and screw everything up....both install guides for the R4 from dell and NBR never mentioned this BS if this is common like you say. There goes 12 hours of time reinstalling windows updates and programs. I absolutely hate computers. ASUS never had this BS...the laptop was crap but never had this special order of installing drivers or batched BIOS settings from the get go.

 

OK, for those of us about to install an SSD into a Dell laptop with an existing HDD - you need to go into the BIOS before putting the new SSD in, and put it into ACHI mode, THEN put in the new SSD and install the OS? Or put the SSD in, then go into the BIOS and enable ACHI, then install the OS?