NP9150 mSATA Specs - Ok to be used as a boot drive??

Greetings all-

I am going to be purchasing an NP9150 this week and am ironing out some final specs. I know I am going for a 2.6GHZ i7, GTX 680M, upgraded chiclet keyboard, and a ton of RAM.

I realize I will have to make some sacrifices to get what I want and am trying to make the best of things. I know these laptops trade battery life and portability for raw POWER. Power is what I am after, so I am ok with this. That being said, I want to try to make the system as light as possible and the battery last as long as it can. To make that happen, I want to have an empty optical bay and no hard drive at all. This will save power and weight (not a lot, but every ounce counts).

I need a little more info before I decide. I would like to order the system with no hard drives and throw one of the new Crucial m4 256GB mSATA drives. Here's more info and a review:

Crucial m4 256GB mSATA SSD Review

The mSATA drive I listed above will make this possible. It is unbelievably light and is about as fast as their standard 2.5" SSD. I will use this as my only hard drive for now. I might need more space later and can then install a regular SSD, but this way I save the most weight and power.

My question is about the mSATA slot on the NP9150. Is this slot capable of the same speeds as the hard drive bay?? Are there any limitations?? Does anyone else do this?? I know XoticPC offers an 80GB mSATA drive as a Windows C:\ partition so that means this is at least possible.

Thanks for any info you can provide!!!

-J

 

Yea works great as a boot drive, we offer them and thats how I have my personal machine configured, with a spinning data drive in the read drive bay. Works great!

 

If I'm not mistaken, the mSATA slot is SATA II, so you will not see full SATA III performance out of that drive. At least that is the case with mine; other brands may vary, so check with your builder to confirm.

 

This is exactly why I am posting here. I need to find out if there are any limitations on the mSATA port (like SATA II vs SATA III) and I have already gotten two different responses. One says it works fine, one says the mSATA might be limited.

Does anyone know for sure??

-J

 

I used my M4 in a SATA-II slot on my old laptop - the only time I "lost out" was with sequential reads. For everything else on that drive I was within the bandwidth of SATA-II.

 

The main bay is sata3 and msata is sata2. Half the speed. msata is also more expensive.

 

In most real world instances you won't notice a difference between sata ii and sata iii, especially if you come from just HDD. You will be blown away. Only in benchmarks will you really see a difference, and possibly during sequential read/write processes. I went from sata ii to sata iii SSD and everything still feels the same, though I secretly think it is faster lol.

You can try and try to push batter life, but two hours tops. Maybe 2.5. These things use up some watts. Also, if you plan on using it for power you wouldjt want to from batter anyways.

Edit. If you don't think you'll need an optical disk drive, you will find it cheaper to use a standard SSD+HDD combo.

Sent from my EVO using Tapatalk 2

 

Thanks for the info everyone. It looks like I should just go with a normal 2.5' SSD and leave all the other bays empty. I can always install more drives for space at a later date if I need it.

 

Hi, I order a P150EM, with a 750GB 7200rpm HD, and bought a OCZ Nocti 120GB mSATA to put on him, and saw this thread, so if I can, wanna make some questions:

1) Do I need to make anything before install? Or I only need to put BIOS in AHCI mode?
2) Is it good to use the SRT cache in the mSATA, if I'm installing the OS on mSATA?
3) Do I need to retire the HDD drive, and make the install only with mSATA connected?
4) I saw that some ppl need to make a USB bootable disk, and put some drivers into it, why? The Win7 SP1 doesn't have the drivers for mSATA disks?

Thanks!

 

Do you have a MicroCenter near you? I was there last weekend and they had OCZ 128GB Vertex 3 for $90 and lesser, but still SATA 3 128 GB for $78.

 

That's a pretty sweet deal. I looked up Microcenter and it turns out there's one pretty close to me. I am definitely gonna go check out what they've got this weekend.

-J