Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

It may help read and write times for data on or going onto that drive; it won't affect the 256GB SSD at all, but that won't need a speed boost anyway. Hybrid hard drive is indeed a bit misleading (and "Solid State Hybrid Drive" is even more of a misnomer IMHO), but it's technically accurate in that it's a single drive that has both spinning magnetic platters and flash memory onboard, though of course there's much more of the former than the latter.

 

Thanks for the info. So if out of the 3 pre-configured models with the better screen option, you can either get one 512 ssd and a battery into the second bay or a 256gb ssd with a 500 gb hybrid. So either fast but small storage, or slow 2nd drive but more storage. Are people getting the second and selling/chucking the 500gb hybrid to replacing that with regards to adding more storage, or future plans too when that's maxed? If I got the 512 ssd single drive, I might blow through that quicker than the duel drive option, but I like the speed it delivers. Neither option seems ideal. Hate pre-configured models.

 

The options are 256GB of fast storage + 500GB of "regular" storage (with a smaller battery), or 512GB of fast storage with a larger battery. Some people are indeed ordering the spec with the hybrid drive and planning to replace it with a 2.5" SSD to get lots of storage all of which is fast (but still with a smaller battery), although the 500GB drive is only 5mm tall, which is slimmer than the "slim" 7mm spec that most SSDs use and much slimmer than the standard 9.5mm thickness -- but with SSDs you can actually just remove the 2.5" casing to make it fit.

EDIT: I was wrong about the 5mm. That pertains to the Inspiron 14 7000 I was researching for my sister at the same time and I got the specs confused in my head. Not sure whether the M3800 is 7mm or 9.5, but it's definitely more than 5. Sorry about that!

I got the 512GB option because I knew I wanted the larger battery, didn't want to deal with having two separate drive letters (or dealing with RAID spanning, assuming that's even an option), and didn't think I'd ever need that much internal storage. And if I outstrip that capacity, it's possible that 1TB mSATA drives will be available by then, and if not I can just buy a small 2.5" USB 3.0 enclosure and use that instead, at which point I still have the larger battery AND the larger original internal SSD, with extra storage at a pretty minimal inconvenience.

 

If you need a bigger SSD drive in the second (dual-drive) configuration you can just ask your Dell sales rep to do that. I did, and my sales rep had no problem upgrading my SSD from 256 GB to 512 GB, even though it's not a standard option on the website. I also wanted to upgrade the secondary Hard ("Hybrid") Drive to 1TB, but that wasn't available for some reason. No big deal. I can always upgrade the second drive down the road.

It might be cheaper to upgrade the SSD drive on your own, but then again, you would have a hassle of reinstalling Windows. Since this is a business laptop, I'd rather have Dell send me the configuration I need fully installed, configured and supported.

 

There's no need to reinstall anything. You can just image the drive the machine is shipping with, and copy the image to your new drive.

 

I understand. Still, I'd rather have Dell do that. This way I am guaranteed that my factory-configured system is 100% supported by my 3-year warranty. And should I need any technical support down the road they wouldn't be able to blame my self-installed hardware.

 

I'm reading about a ton of quirks with the XPS 15 from whirring noises to touch screen failure to discoloration of the trackpad, to trackpad inaccurate response for some corners, to massive GPU throttling to poor wireless reception (apparently fixed by new drivers) to... you name it. Obviously the ones with issues will write more but it seems like it's not very polished. It might be too optimistic, but I'm hoping the m3800 somehow won't suffer from these issues.

What bugs me is that some of this stuff like trackpad discoloration and general trackpad glitchiness appears to be unrelated to a defective model. The MBP also has issues like a yellow tint on the screen, some whirring sound etc. but none of these affect every model so you can just return and get what you want. I was pretty set on the m3800 after wavering back and forth between it and the MBP. Now, I'm going to wait for more details on both. I was hoping this would be the year when I could get a Windows laptop on par in specs, design and build quality to a MBP.

 

With everything in life - from cars to washing machines to consoles and notebooks its always a best idea to wait a bit and not to purchase stuff in its "first revision" but wait (if possible) a bit till they polish some bugs and quirks.

 

Can you tell which sales rep you dealt with? I talked to one who wouldn't allow the upgrade. A contact info would be helpful. Thanks!

 

One other note that is worry some on top of all these reports is that for the m3800 Dell is not following up on their typical 3 year support that is usually included for their business line equipment... I do not know why they took that decision, but obviously one could very well read into this that they do not stand fully behind that product... I hope that it is not the case, but still I think they should review that decision if they want to avoid some misinterpretations...