Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

The hybrid drive is 500GB, not 512 like the mSATA SSD. Please be careful with that to avoid confusion. And if the France store is anything like the US, the 500GB hybrid drive isn't shown on the initial comparison page but is definitely shown if you look at the Detailed View of your cart to see the full specification. And eew, VGA? No digital input options in your display? Makes a world of difference at any resolution above 1280x1024.

 

correct: hybrid is 500GB.
my displays have hdmi but i don't expect my clients to have hdmi or displayport so I better have one ready in my bag saw some for around 20€ on amazon.

 

Hi guys,
Great thread... I am new to this but have been reading for the past few weeks and have learned quite a lot. so thanks to all the posters.
One quick question which I do not think I have seen through my reading. I have purchased the mid-tier M3800, but I am not sure what the second 500Gb hybrid drive comes with. It does not say in the specs when you purchase the machine. I thought it would be the same as the lower end XPS 500Gb with 32 Gb SSD drive tied to it. But I think I had seem mentioned in here something about an 8Gb SSD tied with it.
Can anyone please confirm which one it is??? I am a little confused here.

thanks,

JF

 

Its a 500gb traditional harddrive with 8gb of cache onboard. All in one unit as opposed to separate.

 

They're actually both right. The spec with the 500GB hybrid hard drive includes a 32GB mSATA SSD in the mSATA slot. The 8GB flash refers to flash memory built into the hybrid hard drive itself (hence the "hybrid" designation). So you end up with an 8GB cache managed by the spinning drive itself (and invisible to the rest of the system), as well as a 32GB mSATA cache managed by Intel Smart Response.

 

If I am using the 500gb hybrid drive for bulk file storage of CAD drawings, etc. and my operating system and programs are on the 256gb ssd main drive, what does that hybrid 32gb cache or 8gb flash do for me? Anything?

 

You can't have both a hybrid hard drive and a 256GB SSD "main drive" unless the 256GB SSD is an mSATA drive, in which case that would replace the 32GB mSATA SSD, leaving the 8GB built into the hybrid hard drive as your only cache. At that point the cache on the hybrid drive is there just to allow data on THAT DRIVE to potentially get read and written faster; it's not a system-wide cache that can be used for your mSATA drive, though it wouldn't make sense to put a cache in front of an SSD anyway. The drive puts the most frequently accessed data on that drive in its cache, and when you write to the drive, if there's space available in the cache it will write the data into flash memory so the operation completes faster and then transfer it onto the magnetic platters later in the background. All of this is transparent to you, and you don't have any control over what data resides in the 8GB cache. That cache basically turns a regular hard drive into a "regular hard drive plus" of sorts. Once you've used it enough and it's had time to figure out what data it should keep in the cache for you, benchmarks do show a very noticeable improvement, and considering that hybrid hard drives don't cost much more than regular drives, it's a no-brainer purchase as an alternative to one without a cache -- but it's still nowhere near as fast as an SSD, partly because the data you want isn't always ready in the cache and partly because the flash memory and controller used for the cache are significantly slower than the versions of those components used in modern SSDs.

 

Ok, well there's 4 pre-configured options in the US, and this would be the second one with;

256GB Solid State Drive Full Mini Card
Additional 2.5 inch 500GB Solid State Hybrid Drive

 

Right, so that configuration wouldn't include the 32GB mSATA cache because you're putting a 256GB unit in there instead. In that setup your C drive would be the mSATA SSD for Windows, applications, and important data where bandwidth matters, and the hybrid drive would be a bulk data storage device for stuff that doesn't need blazing transfer speeds.

 

So in this setup, the 8gb would be the hybrid ssd part and MAY help or may not with read and write times for often used files? Would use the word 'hybrid' loosely, as I am not sure what 8gb really buys you?