mSATA Incident

I have my Crucial m4 256GB mSATA as my OS drive.
Unfortunately, couldn't get the charger to my laptop in time, & it ran out of battery yesterday & went off.

So I plug in the charger & it goes straight to the BIOS screen. The mSATA was not detected. The other SATA ports showed my data HDDs, but the mSATA was not recognized so couldn't boot. Tried cold boots, waiting, removed-replaced the drive..nothing helped. It was as if the drive wasn't there! (The charger was plugged in throughout). Then I unplugged & called it a day.

Today morning, I tested again & everything was back to normal! Booted up fine. Like nothing happened.

Should be concerned about any damage to the mSATA / Motherboard?

 

I wouldn't be too concerned - sounds like the BIOS and/or the SSD reset themselves - this usually needs something like 30 minutes for certain systems.

Make a backup, keep it current and make sure you don't let the battery power run out like that again. ;^)

 

Yes, something's got happen twice before I would get concerned.

 

Count your lucky stars.

Make a backup ASAP!

Make a backup that you are 100% sure of (not 99.9%).

And actually spend a day (or whatever) to make sure that you can actually restore from that backup.

If all you have on the mSATA boot drive is 1 or 2 NTFS partitions, you might be able to do that by booting a recent Acronis True Image Home disc; but I've not done that myself on a notebook, only on a desktop.

Out of honest curiosity, how did you get "3 x 1TB WD Scorpio Blue" (from your tag info) setup on a notebook?

Or is that connected externally to your Sager NP9170 notebook?

And why so much?

I mean even for most desktops 3GB is a lot; for a notebook 3GB is a lot more than a lot.

 

Given that the NP9170 has two HDD bays, you can replace the optical with a HDD and a mSATA connector, you can have a total of 4 drives in it including the mSATA. I could do the same with my M6700, it's too bad Dell didn't wire the WWAN slot as mSATA too (they could have since there is one unused SATA port on the cipset) so you could actually have another mSATA in it for a total of 5 drive. Oh well, 4 is still pretty neat.

 

+1

+1

Don't have a backup yet as all I had on it was the OS + STEAM. Will get to doing that now.

1 TB WD Scorpio Blue in the Primary HDD Slot.
Another in the Secondary HDD Slot
A third in place of the ODD using a ODD-HDD Caddy.

Why.. Because I lost my 3TB Seagate external. Have a lot of storage requirements.. HD stuff.

You mean TB GBs are not enough for anyone

Exactly! Even the Alienware m18x can have 5 drives if you replace the ODD. That would be one beast.

4.25 TB if you go HDD + mSATA or 2.25 TB if you go crazy with all 512GB SSDs + 256 GB mSATA !

Although the Alienwares only have SATA II connectors for both the Primary & Secondary slots.

 

Intel's mobo's can only prove 2 x SATA-III connectors

 

I'm pretty sure that's what he meant even if he wrote SATA II. The Intel chipsets, aside from the cheaper ones, support a total 6 SATA posts, two of them 6Gbps. I'm not even sure there is a laptop chipset that doesn't support 6 SATA ports.

 

Yes, III. Typo.

Yep, that's what I meant. AMD Trinity mobile chipsets have 6 SATA3 ports though. Which is why the comparison.