Couple of Questions About Storage from a potential p170em buyer.

I'm looking to buy a p170em around the end of may when the 7970 comes out. I've been looking around on a couple of the reseller websites and I'm down to xotic or malibal. My biggest questions are about storage options.

1. Can I set up a larger non-msata ssd as a caching drive?

2. Will Either of those resellers put in a drive that isn't listed on the customizer, such as a crucial m4?

3. In general. What storage setup do you reccomend? I don't mind setting up a secondary drive aftermarket, but I'd prefer to have the os drive pre-installed.

 

1) why would you want that?
2) ask them, or better buy it yourself and ask them to come without a HDD
3) SSD + HDD

 

1. I suppose you could, but I can't see the appeal. You usually use caching when you don't have room for a larger SSD and want to use an HDD as your main drive. I'd still recommend using a 64GB or larger SSD as the Windows system drive and then having a big HDD as a secondary storage drive. Just skip the caching altogether.

2. It depends on the reseller. For drives, you can do it yourself in about 5 minutes of time, so it's not really worth sending a drive in to be installed into your machine.

3. I'd recommend what I listed in 1). The SSD + HDD combo is the best performer and can be pretty cheap if you go with a smaller SSD.

 

1. Agreed with Anthony here. Having a SSD primary and HDD is still faster then the caching drives.
2. Sager only offer Intel drives. You can put in your own if you'd like but consider just going with Intel 520 series, they have the top speeds (others are equal) and usually ranked best for reliability.
3. 120GB SSD + 750GB HDD is the most popular set up.

 

If you opt for an ssd cache drive + ssd as primary OS drive, then are you profiting from the cache drive? I saw Xotic's review of the P170EM and the setup was an Intel 310 Series 80GB + Intel 520 Series 120GB if Im not mistaken. Is this better than just 1 SSD (say Intel 520 120GB)?

 

Yeah - this is good question - i am looking for the same notebook - but i didnt heard anything about that cache drive - maybe not in every P170EM there is that special SSD slot? Does anyone knows?

 

All P170EM/NP9170 laptops have a slot for the mSATA SSD drive. There should be an option, but it may also depend who you buy it from, that you can select to have the mSATA SSD setup as a caching drive.

There are some advantages to a caching SSD, as it uses the same principal Seagate offers with their XT Hybrid drives. In this case, the SSD caching isn't built directly into the HDD and you get a bit more SSD for caching.

 

To answer your question, we were talking about small mSATA SSD's (smaller than the 2.5" ones). These can either act as cache drives (faster loading of the OS and programs) or as primary OS drives.

So my question remains in the quotes....

 

If you use an intel 520 SSD and the Cache Drive, you might actually see a performance decrease as the mSATA drives that Sager are using are SATA II. If they were using the Samsung mSATA drives it would be neutral. Also note that the density of the drives affects performance, so the smaller the SSD the less performance you get.

The only place these caching drives are a viable option is on the NP9150 where you only have a single HDD bay. The benefit to mSATA is size, and these aren't ultra books you're buying.

Until MSI and Sager start using Samsung mSATA drives, you'll get far superior performance from a Patriot Wildfire or an OCZ vertex 3.

 

Thanks for all the advice, it looks like SDD+HDD is the way to go.Just one more quick question, and this one may seem pretty random.

When you get a hard drive in the optical drive bay, what does it look like externally?

 

If you apply the bezel from the old optical drive (or just use the one that comes with the caddy)- it just looks like any other optical drive. You just can't open it, since it's not actually an optical bay.

 

Can someone clarify please. Would it make sense to use a 80gb msata as os boot drive, and then have two 750gb 7200rpm hds in raid 0. Is this possible?

A little confused on what can be put in the p170em. Assuming I get an optical drive, I can still get 3 hard drives? One mSata, and two ssd or normal hard drives?

Or if I opt to get a hard drive instead of optical, I could do one msata and 3 ssd or normal hard drives?

 

You can do that yes. Personally I wouldn't but if you need cavernous amounts of storage then do it.

If you get an optical drive, you can have an mSATA+2 full size drives. What you have listed is correct.

Final point is correct as well.

 

Thanks for the feedback. Yea may be a bit excessive. I'd like to have a ssd for the decreased boot times and for gaming performance. The 80gb mSata would be great for windows 7 and a few primary application I use for photo and video editing, and maybe a couple games (can't wait for diablo 3!), and the other hard drive(s) would be for all my storage.

 

My thing with mSATA drives is that they are more expensive per GB and also slower than a 2.5" SSD. For the most optimal performance an HDD/SSD combo works best. You could always throw in another drive or an mSATA later on.