Time for a storage upgrade - Help Needed

I am getting ready to upgrade the storage capacity of my NP9170. I've decided to go with the following hardware - ADATA 64gb msata and 2x 1TB Hitachi GST drives

ADATA XPG SX300 ASX300S3-64GM-C Solid State Drive - Newegg.com

Newegg.com - Hitachi GST Travelstar 0S03563 1TB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive

My plan is use the twin 1tb drives in RAID 0 (that makes it a single drive?) and use the msata as a caching drive with Intel Rapid Storage Technology. My end goal is to have one massive drive and fairly quick start up times. Having just one drive (one C:, no other drives ) to put everything on is the main goal, so an SSD + HDD combo isnt for me. Based on my research, using the 64gb msata and 2x1tb hdd is the best way to get a large single drive with quick start up times. Correct me if I am wrong.

All my previous hard drive upgrades coincided with an OS upgrade and were single drive swaps (i basically just popped out the drive with new one and loaded up the cd). Also, have never done this on a Sager. Would like to put together a step by step guide. Any help is much appreciated.

 

Sounds like you have a great plan worked out. 64gb is the limit on SRT and I've heard great things about those Adata drives. Should treat you very well. The upgrade itself is going to be fairly straightforward. Take off the back panel and you'll find one of the bays under the ODD and the other in plain site w/ the Msata connection nearby if I remember correctly. This service manual should be pretty helpful as well. LINK

 

Thanks Derek. I am pretty confident about the hardware side of things - I am more concerned about how to set it up software wise.

I have the included drivers disc that was shipped (i ordered direct from sager). I do have an extra copy of win7 around, but i was planning on burning a recovery disc. Once i plug all the drives in, I would turn on the comp, hit whatever FN key it is to get the bios, and then do what? How do i enable RAID 0 and the Intel SRT?

 

You'd want to get into the BIOS and select the Raid type to Raid 0. Perhaps somebody that has been in the Sager BIOS more extensively than I have would be able to provide more detail but should be pretty easy to find. You'd want to set that raid across the two mechanical drives and leave the Msata alone. You'd boot into the Windows disk and it should show a single 2tb drive ready for format and install. Once you get Windows installed, booted up, and drivers installed you'd want to install the Intel SRT software, get it running and have it format the Msata drive for the SRT tech. Once you get going on everything it'll be pretty intuitive on how to get everything done, I wouldn't stress over it too much and just get your hands dirty

 

Hi

I hope you don't me putting this in here, I was just about to start the same type of thread(but for a p370em)

I've bought a second intel 520 ssd, I currently have one as my (C) drive, I'm also planning on a raid 0 config, my 2 questions are.

1- will I lose all my data on the original drive when i enable the raid ?

2- how do I go about enabling it?

 

These systems are not actually ideal to be putting the SSDs in Raid. Doing so you'll lose the TRIM support which, long story short, causes your drives die much faster as it is possible that the drive will read/write over the same sectors over and over causing the drive to fail over time sooner than it would with TRIM enabled.

You're still free to do so but not recommended. WHen putting it into Raid you will lose all the data and you'd want to follow the same steps enabling it in the BIOS and then reinstalling windows.

 

DAM!

When I seen the option on the configuration page, I thought this would be my answer. Better performance(I know ssd are fast enough) and keeping the cost lower than buying a 240gb drive.

 

Yeah the option is there for the mechanical drives if somebody wants to, and it's also possible on the SSD but every time we see it and Sager see the option selected on SSD configurations we're calling the customer up and advising against it. Shouldn't be a problem in the next gen machines with Intel firmware updates but as of right now not the best option unless the machine is specifically designed for it. Pretty sure it works in the 9570 as well due to the different chipset.

 

So is the problem in the chipset, or the drive firmware?

 

It is in part both. The firmware on the drives are updateable to support it but if the chipset on the mainboard doesn't support it then it won't matter if you update the firmware on the drive.

 

Oh well, looks like I've just spunked £140 on a useless drive.