*** Official Clevo x7200 and Sager NP7280 owners lounge ***

what are latest bios of Clevo X7200???

 

bv13 is the newest

 

what a date release of bios?

 

In the below link is the latest...and FINAL...most likely for this model...

728BV13S.ISO
-

 

it may be 13a version?

 

Thats to bad will be the last version, expected but to bad. I was hoping that at least the RAID BIOS would continue to be updated.

 

need to releas a bios for the up coming gpu's other wise the upgrade ability has gone out the window
hope fully they will release one for the 680 =gk104 and one later this year for the gk110/100 gpu's

 

Hello,

I am thinking of replacing the optical drive in my x7200 with an SSD. Right now it has a boot ssd, and 2 hdds in raid-0 for gaming. I was planning to use the new ssd to dump a few games on where load times matter to me. I've never done this before so I had a few questions (I do have the caddy).

1. I've read around that the optical drive is limited to sata II, but I thought so were all the other drives on x7200, so should performance be the same as compared to the other hd bays?

2. I assumed this would be relatively plug and play since its not a boot drive, is there anything I'm not thinking of?

3. The above option (optical bay) is the easy option. Part of me wants to rip out the 2 raided HDDs, replace it with one large SSD and maybe keep one HDD for backup. Then keep the optical installed. The only issue is I've never opened up the machine, am scared about screwing it up. I tried doing similar surgery on an old laptop I had and the surgery didn't go well. Think a dummy like me could do this with just the x7200 manual and good intentions (and screw driver). If so, would this screw up my bios settings - which are set now to support the raid 0 hdds?

Sorry for all the questions.
Thanks

 

Well, I can answer #3 for ya. Its easy..I mean really easy. There is one screw on the back to remove and the optical bay slides out, put in the new caddy with the HD and youre good. Yes, it really is that simple. And I am paranoid about opening it up also.

Get the downloadable service manual, and it shows ya exactly what screw...I bought my bay from Xotic PC. I have kinda of a diff setup than youre planning, but same idea. I use the drive in the optical bay as a hot spare.

If you go the other route and replace any of the other hard drives, there easy also. Access is right from a panel underneath, again, the manual shows ya. And ya a screw driver and youre good.

 

Performance is fine, I have had no issues at all with a drive in place of my dvd drive.

Yes, its plug in and play....

Its easy..I mean really easy. There is one screw on the back to remove and the optical bay slides out, put in the new caddy with the HD and youre good. Yes, it really is that simple. And I am paranoid about opening it up also.

Get the downloadable service manual, and it shows ya exactly what screw...I bought my bay from Xotic PC. I have kinda of a diff setup than youre planning, but same idea. I use the drive in the optical bay as a hot spare.

If you go the other route and replace any of the other hard drives, there easy also. Access is right from a panel underneath, again, the manual shows ya. And ya a screw driver and youre good.

 

Thanks for the reply man. One additional question - I'm looking at the caddy right now and there don't seem to be any actual screws on the caddy itself to hold in the SSD. Am I missing something - or does it just plug right into the ports at the end and thats it? Thanks

 

I bought my caddy from XoticPC, and it came with screws.....

 

I have 5 screws going around the top part of the frame, but I can't seem to see how they would actually do anything to hold the drive in place. They are screwed in at present.

 

Those dont, those hold the frame together. I have 4 screw holes on the bottom, that screws go into the HD to hold it in.

 

Ok, I actually see three screws on the metal plate part at the bottom. They aren't visible coming up through the bottom of the metal plate buy perhaps those are them.

 

You may have a different style caddy then I do......

 

Ok, thanks for your help man, really appreciate it. Sorry for all the questions.

 

NP at all with the questions.....you will find a ton of helpfull people here with your system. All in all I have been very happy with mine.

 

Ok heh, I've decided to be more ambitious since newegg decided to have a sale on the M4 today. I'm still going to swap the optical drive, so the above will still hold true.

I think my other project will be the destruction of the raid-0 hdds. Here is what I'd like to do:

1. Backup everything first on the raid-0 to an external hdd.
2. Remove one of the two hdds and drop in the M4.
3. Keep one of the HDD for backup purposes.

So for the above, the prior instructions for the physical replacement of the drives should be hopefully straightforward. As for the BIOS, using the above setup, would I have to make any changes in it? Right now the two HDDs are configured to a raid-0. If I remove one of the two hdds - other than losing the data, will anything else happen? This is what I'd like my system to look like in the end:

Bay 1. Intel x-25 - primary drive/OS (staying as is).
Bay 2. mechanical HDD - 320 gb
Bay 3. Crucial M4 128gb
Optical Drive. Intel 320 160gb.

 

Right now your BIOS is probably set up for RAID, switch it to ACHI, other than that, no changes really.

Should work just fine. FWIW, I returned my Crucial M4, kept siezing up and freezing for a few seconds here and there. I REALLY was not happy with it. RMA'd it in less than a week and picked up my Corsair ForceGT 240GB and love it.

 

I don't know if this is important, but before changing / removing , you may want to do CTRL+I at boot to make sure the RAID volume has been removed from the ICHR10 BIOS.

Now, removing the drives or changing from RAID to AHCI may do this for you, but by removing it you know it has been removed from the Intel BIOS RAID config. Again, I have no idea if it is important, but it would be something that resets the BIOS back to its original state.

 

Aactually, when you switch from RAID to ACHI in the BIOS, you cant even do a ctl-I to access the ICHR10 BIOS, its just not avaliable if you dont have RAID set in the BIOs.

Found that out in my many variations and experaments.....

 

Yeppers. That is why I mentioned doing Ctrl+I before changing / removing things in the system.

Does going from RAID to AHCI then back to RAID remove the volume?

I want to reiterate *none* of this may be important as it may be covered by switching the AHCI/RAID setting. But for those OCD based ppl like myself, it is a step which brings the system back to its original state (w/ out any RAID volumes) in the beginning stages.

 

Regarding the Ctrl-I comments, by this do you mean prior to physically removing the raided hdds, to be extra safe I should first go into the Intel utility (Ctrl - I) and delete the raid volume?

Thanks

 

Yes, that is what I was suggesting. However, it may be totally superfluous.

 

Thanks. Also, based on my review of the manual, the first two HDD slots are on the left, the third separate on the right of the case. For the panel that contains the first two HDD bays, do you know if bay one (i.e. primary) is on the bottom or the top (I assume from the pictures they are on top of each other?)

 

On my machine, the slot/bay closest to the "bottom" is the 1st drive. The slot/bay closest to the motherboard (furthest away from the bottom) is the 2nd drive.

 

Hey, need some opinions on something, I have ben loking at this product:

Disk Cache, Hybrid Disk Cache and RamDisk

to speed up disk access....

what ya all think.

 

depends on what you'll use it for, if it's for things like putting a browser and temp files in there then there's little boost compared to an ssd.

if it's humongous read/writes like a database for example then the benefits are noticeable

 

All my tmp and browser are on my SSD boot drive, my D drive, is a raid1 mirror, contains all my apps and data, so I was looking at faster load times etc......

Plus the few gams I play are also on there.

I am testing it now, and I do see a improvement

 

So I ran some tests last night on Disk Cache, Hybrid Disk Cache and RamDisk and all I can say is WOW.....either the tests are WAY off (I ran these 3 times) or this is just..I donno....take a look

These runs are from my raid1 mirror, 2X WD Scorpio Blacks, 750GB

I know those are benchmarks, the software comes a 14 day trial which I am doin, I want to see some real world use. But from my runs so far, last night looked promising. The desktop version is $80.

 

yup, and it'll only go higher the faster your ram is

 

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or get you nail under the batt push it up and it will pop

 

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let it reboot a couple of time if nothing beeps then it was just some setting that had gotten a f up in the bios

 

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do some test reboots if it dont beep its fine but if it does then download memtest86 4.2 its free then run it with one stick at a time that will show you the one or if one is defect
if that dont work se if you have a setting in bios called beep on selftest or seftest or beep on startup there is a couple of posibilitys
if nothing of this work reflash your bios with the latest one if that dont work then we talk about it then

 

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dont think so when my power went the it sowed down and then gave me a varning

 

test the rams with memtest just to be shore

 

talk to morro m8 its late here

 

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I doubt its the vid driver, as I recently also upgraded mine ot the latest.

 

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Pissible I guess, could always flash to the latest BIOs

 

i would at least try a reflash