E6520 Owner's Thread

Wow. That's great. Wonder if you have any other older Dell system that you can swap the CoreStore MV in place of the wifi and see if it boots too? I'm wondering if it has a PCI ROM that gives it the ability to boot. I'd be surprised if the Dell BIOS allowed boot from a mPCIe device.

Someone should try it in a Dell D430 whose ZIF/PATA drive is painfully slow. The Corestore MV would be a SATA solution for it.

 

I just installled a BCM4311 wifi card into the WWAN slot and it works. Im not sure if this helps the cause any but the card should be PCIE as well. I dont think we have determined if the WWAN slot is only a USB link or a full PCIE slot yet. Just figured id drop by and let you all know!

( BCM4311 is supported by OSX and I will be trying to tripple boot Lion )

 

I did this already, a while ago, with a Latitude D830 and an E6400. It didn't work in either one of them. The behavior was exactly the same as it used to be in the E6520 - the BIOS checks would complete, then a cursor would blink, eternally, in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.

I called Dell back in October and asked them to provide BIOS support for the CoreStore in the E6520. That's most likely why it now works.

 

I think all three slots are wired exactly the same. I think the names in the plastic (WWAN / SATA Flash / Whatever) are just decoration and meant more as suggestion as opposed to saying you must put these types of devices in these slots.

Why do I think this? I put my CoreStore SSD into the half-height "SATA Flash" slot and although it's a full-length card and didn't sit flat, the machine still booted up just fine.

 

1. I'm not sure what you mean by "any" mini-PCIe card. As I said in another post, I specifically requested Dell to provide support for this exact card, and eventually they released a BIOS that supports it. The CoreStore has its own disk controller so perhaps they just made the BIOS such that it could support another controller in addition to the one on the motherboard.

2. My initial tests show it at an average of 60 megabytes per second. Nothing to write home about. When I have time I'll try a couple of different benchmarks and post them.

3. Once I got through the initial installation hiccups, everything has worked perfectly. I know that Microsoft builds checks into the installation such that if something bombs, it doesn't try it again and moves on to something different. So I imagine that's what happened.

Something else that happened during installation, was the boot menu order would get messed up when swapping disks in and out of the other bays. Also, sometimes it would show multiple "Flash Controller" items in the menu instead of just one. However, my system is at the point now where I can either boot straight to the CoreStore, or I can hit F12 during boot and select my old HDD and boot from it instead. It's stable enough that I have switched back and forth multiple times with no problems. I'm also able to swap a hard drive / DVD in and out of the module bay. Everything is working just great.

4. I looked at the UEFI BIOS didn't see any bootable partitions. It says the same thing with my old boot disk when installed in the normal HDD slot.

 

Thats actually pretty good news. Im looking forward to testing out this card i ordered. It is capable of both full and half height. Im planning on wiring up a 2.5" Sata laptop hard drive to the card ( using an external power source ) just for testing purposes. It it works, Im going to order an SSD, remove its casing, and stack it on top of the mechanical hard drive. Thats the plan anyway

 

Sorry, I meant any PCI-E SSD drive. At this point, you think it requires a separate controller to work, as is found in the Corestore?

Is that sustained via windows explorer info or are you using HDTach or something to get read/write profiles? How does that compare to your mechanical HD transfer speeds? Do you notice any difference in system boot up and overall responsiveness during use?

That's great!

 

Yes, that's absolutely what I think. Also, going back to the E6520's boot menu, it actually says "Flash Controller" as one of the options, which refers to the CoreStore.

Some of this information was gleaned from the mSATA FAQ:

There are 3 main types of mini-PCIe Form-Factor SSDs:

1) Proprietary PATA/SATA devices designed to fit in very specific computers, usually netbooks. They don't work in any other computer except those they're designed for, and use proprietary pin-outs in the mini-PCIe slot.
2) mSATA devices designed to use the SATA controller chip integrated on the computer's (most often a laptop, although this desktop Gigabyte board has one also) motherboard. These devices do not have their own controller chip. They require a mini-PCIe slot whose pinout specifically supports mSATA. The cool thing about laptops that have mini-PCIe slots that support the mSATA pinout is they can support any mSATA device. There are quite a number of mSATA devices to choose from nowadays. This is the way the industry is (sort of) heading.
3) Devices like the SuperTalent CoreStore MV, that has both an SSD drive and a hard disk controller chip on the same card. The CoreStore MV is the only mini-PCIe device like this, as far as I know.

This was from using TeraCopy, a Windows Explorer copy-replacement / enhancement utility. I've since benchmarked it using CrystalDiskBench, which is a fairly standard tool. Here is the result of the CoreStore, and a few other drives to compare it to. Note that the WD Scorpio Blue drive is the one that came with the computer. The Corsair P256 is a SATA II drive, and the OCZ Vertex 3 and Samsung 830 are both SATA III.

System boot and responsiveness is definitely much faster than a mechanical drive, and although the charts show it as being much slower than SATA III drives, it still feels plenty fast.

 

Has anyone else noticed a buzzing sound coming from the laptop when on mains and the battery is at 100%?

Mine makes a squeaking/buzzing sound, fairly quiet but enough to be annoying (and set my tinitus going). The sound seems to originate from about where the power plug goes in. Well, it does when the back is on. But with the back off it seems to come from somewhere more central. The sound doesn't come from the SSD.

It only happens when on mains and when the battery is close to fully charged. But not when in BIOS. It happens briefly before the POST screen, then quiet whilst on POST screen, then returns when Windows starts. The sound changes pitch, particularly if any graphics action is happening (e.g. dragging windows around).

I've only had the system for 3 weeks. It's always behaved this way.

A Dell engineer has been and replaced almost everything, bit by bit. New system board, new i/o connector board, new DC cable, new screen, new CPU. No fix. Oh, and we tried a different power supply (first!).

Puzzled.

Thanks in advance for any light you can shed.

E6520 (Dell cert. refurb.), i7-2640M (dual core, 2.8), 128GB SSD (Samsung PM830), 4GB (1 x Samsung 1333 MHz), NVS 4200M, 1920 x 1080, backlit keyboard, 9 cell battery

 

You can also OC with nTune, the nVidia utility.

My CPU is close to hitting 90*C when I game...not sure if it's because I have PhysX set to use CPU or because it is pasted better than the GPU...

Oh well, 5 year warranty.

RANRAN, how's the new battery they sent you? Noticeably better?