E6520 Owner's Thread

The only thing that throws me off was the first email I was sent from the tier two support.


Good Afternoon Wayne,

I have submitted a request for information to engineering on your question regarding what interface the ssd slot runs on,

As for the people have tried to get ssd cards to work with no luck there is only one card certified with this system

128GB S2-SSD, FULL MCARD, Samsung, PM810

DELL Part# 190DF

As for bootable, no with no plans to add this feature to currently shipping models will it be implemented in future models the industry will drive that decision if it becomes popular to get the attention of marketing they will probably recommend engineering add it if it is a small market they will probably not.



In that email, he states that there IS an MSATA ssd certified by dell to at least work as storage. It just wont boot. Kind of odd isnt it? This implies a SATA pinout, and that its just the BIOS that isnt configured to use the port as a bootable device.

If thats the case, then Nando4's suggestion in the other thread about stripping a SATA SSD of its case and using a 7mm Sata HDD stacking them on top of another would actually be very plausible. You would be able to use the SATA Adapter card similar to the one i ordered, and wire the data/power leads to the Mechanical drive as secondary storage. Then just use the existing HDD sata port to connect to the SSD making it the bootable drive.

 

Actually, the prices for big SSD are going down, you already can get 240 Gb Corsair (good one, not some OCZ) for 250 Euro and a 480 Gb for 600 Euro. Or get a 480 Gb OCZ or Kingston for ~400-500
First dropped in price from ~350 Euro in last 4 months and the second dropped in price from ~800 Euro. So, at the end of the year one can afford a good SSD instead of some wiring in a notebook with guarantee.
Although i would be glad, if with only some driver issues i could plug a bootable mSATA in my notebook.

 

Unless you are using discs daily, which is very unlikely, a lot of this is recent chat is unnecessary.

It's far easier to get a small SSD and replace the optical drive with a hard drive.

Then, you simply redirect all the user directories to the second drive in the registry. Simple.

You can get a cable, and still carry around optical drive and connected to an eSATA port if you need to. I haven't used the optical drive since I installed Windows.

Regular SSD's perfom better anyhow.

 

I agree. So far I`m using USB 3.0 E-Module instead of DVD.

 

I finally got Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 x64 installed AND BOOTING on my SuperTalent CoreStore MV. My setup looks like this:

50GB CoreStore MV SSD - C:\, Bootable (mini-PCIe slot)
DVDRW - D:\ (modular bay)
500GB Seagate 7200 RPM HDD - E:\ (HDD bay)

It wasn't completely without hiccups, though, I got this bluescreen once. nvumis.sys is the driver for the CoreStore MV. The whole system locked up two more times, requiring me to do hard power offs before getting it going again. It's been working fine for the past couple of hours, though. I've finished installing all the Microsoft updates and am in the process of installing drivers.

 

OH!!! THATS GREAT!!! Thank you!
Could you write here, how to install that card, how to install and boot windows from it and about problems during that process?

 

If you have been following the recent chat, I for one DO use my dvd drive daily as that is how my job disseminates things. Over the network or email doesn't work well with RAW Data over 4Gb in size. Its much easier for them to burn it to a disc. Sure we could use thumb drives. Sure we could upgrade to a Gigabit network. That's not how the big boss wants things done

We are merely discussing the if's and how's of using our laptops internal ports which it was designed with. Don't be so quick to toss your opinion telling us that our opinions are "unnecessary".


Erblemoof, I for one would LOVE to hear how you got everything up and running. I was actually debating in testing my pcie/sata card out once it gets here by using grub and hoping to chainload windows from the pcie drive. I sadly can't test anything until the adapter gets here though :-( Expected date is May 4 UGH

 

... Did I just walk into the 90's?

Daily use of multiple DVD-R's has probably surpassed the cost of upgrading... Tell that to your boss.

Network speed is way faster than disc burn.

 

That's beside the point. I for one would like to utilize my notebook to its fullest extent..... wouldnt you ? LOL

 

Sooo...to migrate back to the point of these past messages here's the situation:

1. There *are* people (such as myself and others) who require the use of their DVD drive on a regular basis.

2. Internal SATA Flash slot exists, which has PCI-E input, but not mSATA

3. erblemoof has gotten a corestore MV PCI-E mini-card to boot Windows 7 - with hiccups.

Now, the questions are:
1. Can any mini-PCI-E card work in this slot or is there something particular about SuperTalent's card?

2. What are the read/write speeds? Especially as compared to a SATA II or SATA III SSD?

3. How reliable will the PCI-e card be? (e.g. no more BSD's once installed, proper wake/sleep/standby/hibernate behaviour, etc....

(edited #4.): Just looking at the BIOS again, erblemoof, have you already played around with the legacy vs. UEFI boot options to search for a bootable partition? Just curious....