Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Ah sadly - after about 7 days of operation, just sitting there, drive D is gone. Went away, came back about 90 minutes later, it is back.

The only thing I can think of, other than getting it replaced/fixed, is turn it into a 1 drive system. Normally, I would replace the C: drive with a 1 TB SSD which would then be ample and a D: drive would not be needed; however, I looked, and the C; drive is actually a recruit board. So I am not sure I can replace it. Is there a way to turn this laptop into a 1 drive 1 TB SSD system - like for example, could I use the D: slot as the single disk, and disable the C: drive/circuit board in BIOS?

Thanks!

 

It's an mSATA drive, which is a standard form factor and can be easily swapped out. (M3800 has room for one mSATA drive, and also a standard 2.5" drive if you have the smaller battery.) They don't make 1TB mSATA drives yet, though. You could purchase a 2.5" 1TB SSD and just remove or ignore the mSATA drive.

 

Actually, they do.

 

Ah, wow, must be rather new. Something else to add to my wish list...

 

Thanks - I already have a 2.5" 1TB SSD I could use, so could I:
(1) Clone system drive to new SSD drive
(2) Install new SSD drive, disable mSATA drive in BIOS, so new drive becomes drive C:/system drive

Is that correct?

 

Yes, that should work fine. After the swap you could keep the mSATA drive for secondary storage. (Maybe it won't have the disappearing problem in that configuration.....)

 

Unlike the Latitudes (and higher-end Precisions) there is no per-SATA-channel disable in the BIOS. That said, there's no problem using only either the mSATA slot OR the 2.5" SATA slot. The mSATA slow will always show up second if the 2.5" slot is populated,though.

With UEFI, it's easy to tell it which to boot of of, whichever of the 2.5" and mSATA you want to use as primary; for BIOS boot, it's trickier (you can easily get the situation I had on my M4700 where the mSATA secondary drive is the OS drive, but the 100MB boot partition was on the 1TB 7200rpm drive.)

 

Hi.
From what I can see, the problem is that the secondary drive (SATA) is having connection issues. Moving the entire system to this drive will probably not be guaranteed to work. I don't see a lot of people with issues on the mSATA, so I would suggest that you find a bigger mSATA drive and put only non-critical files on D:.

Optionally, send it back to Dell and ask for a refund and use that to get the a unit with the 91W battery and 512GB mSATA. Then put the 1TB SSD in a USB3 enclosure and use it for (pretty fast) storage.

I plan to do this but with a 3TB spinner as my storage disk.

Just to check, am I missing something here? It is usually the SATA connection that fails intermittently, no? Anyone had problems with losing the mSATA?

Sent from my GT-N7100 using Tapatalk 2

 

Yes good point, putting all on the drive that is now D may not drive if there are connection issues there because of system board, or whatever.

 

Has anyone had their M3800 crash when put to sleep?

I did a fresh install of Win7, installing all of the latest drivers from the Dell website, and quite often when I put it to sleep and then turn it on later, Windows says it crashed (blue screen).