E6520 Owner's Thread

Hey guys, I plan on buying the aftermarked caddy for the E6520 and put in my own harddrive to get extra harddisk space. My question is if i get the esata external bay from dell and put the caddy into it, will i be able to power the drive via USB only so that I can use it in a regular Desktop/PC that doesnt have a powered eSATA port?

Also where can I order the external esata bay from dell, I had trouble finding it on the Dell accessory page

 

You need to install the WiMax driver after the WiFi driver to complete that card's install or the unknown device may have issues...like you are experiencing.

Scott-

 

Well, the internal or external SATA interface is what you want for secondary HDD use so you get the same performance as the primary drive. If all you want is a USB interface for convenience, just go with any genric 2.5" HDD housing. Most are less than $10.

This is what I did and it works well for me:
1. I ordered the NewModeUS E6520 media bay HDD cady HERE so I could house both drives inside the system since I would use the second HDD more than the optical drive. It is pricy, but it is clean and works nicely.

2. I then bought this cable to enable the use of the bare optical driver externally.

I also went ahead and purchased an extral Dell eSATA media bay housing off of eBay along with an older Dell DVD drive, which I modified to properly fit the housing (the face plate and locking mechanism) and it looks/works nice as well.

Hope this helps.

Scott-

 

I saw that solution and it looks cool, only problem is wouldnt be able to use the drive or optical with regular usb. I might end up doing that though

 

Thanks for the responses. It seems the Dell SSDs are often Samsungs, but still, I've no idea if they are recent models or not. On the basis that Dell make a huge margin on upgrades, especially in the UK, I may as well just order a separate SSD and work out what to do with it myself - I've no experience with the inside of machines but it doesn't look that hard.

Anything else that I may as well add myself? 1600 MHz RAM perhaps?

 

Not sure, but sometimes my E6420 needs to be forced to a specific profile under the Intel tray icon to connect on resume.

 

Great, I will give them a shot! Any chance you have SpeedFan or a similar utility working for you? I'm desperately in need of help with temperatures...

 

No, I do not use those utilities. I simply re-paste the GPU and CPU (including the northbridge chip) with a good thermal compound and make sure Optimus is turned on. The fan on my system stays pretty quiet and only becomes noticeably louder under heavy load (i.e. video transcoding and playback).

Scott-

 

What sort of temps are u guys looking at with the e6520 i7-2720QM / NVS4200? I'm getting around 62c CPU, 57c GPU idle, and 78c CPU, 84c GPU full load. The CPU jumps up to around 90c when I first start Prime95 then drops back down to 78c when the fan starts spinning at a higher speed. Room temp here is around 22c.
I was thinking of repasting the CPU/GPU with AS5, not sure if it will bring much gain? The laptop does run too hot at idle for my liking.

 

Same temps almost...