Injecting New Blood Into a Dell Precision M6600

I work my beloved M6600 quite hard, and recently I have been thinking of upgrading certain components. I thought I would ask you guys (and gals) for your ideas and suggestions. My goal is to ensure certain components are new (SSDs do have a limited life span), and to possibly gain a little speed advantage. My main work involves long and large files in HD video editing with Vegas Pro, plus lots of work on high res images etc etc.

My idea is to swap out the LITEONIT LAT-256M2S SSD AND the Kingston HyperX 250GB SSD for two brand new Samsung 840 EVO or two Samsung 850 Pro (5XX GB or 1TB).

I am not currently running RAID but thought with two new disks like the ones mentioned above it may be worth going for RAID 0. I do not want to reinstall the OS so will clone the system from the main SSD now to one of the new ones, can I still change the RAID status without losing data doing this?

I am also considering getting a Samsung Evo msata (500 or 1TB) but am unsure of how this would benefit me and if I did get that what the best configuration would be. Thoughts?

The redundant Liteon SSD would become an external SSD and the HyperX would go into a HDD caddy in the DVD player slot which is hardly ever used anyway.

I am also thinking of upgrading my RAM from the current 16GB to 32GB. Probably sticking with HyperX unless someone can recommend something better.

What are your thoughts so far?

What else in the machine can I upgrade without too much hassle? I read in the owners thread about people changing the CPU and even the graphics card but as soon as the word "paste" is mentioned I start to worry. All the above I have so far mentioned are very easy to do (though I am not quite sure how to do the RAID part) but changing other things leaves me a little nervous. Though of course with a Quadro 4000M I am very tempted to improve on that.

The body of the M6600 is still great, my battery wear is only 4% or something (rarely use the battery), I back up and image regularly and to be honest am looking at giving it a little injection of fresh blood as it were.

Any thoughts and suggestions are welcome.

Thank you in advance.

 

I would skip the raid, personally. There are some other threads you can find where people haven't found a huge gain in performance (either because of their workload, or the raid controller).


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Thanks, I will look into them.

Any thoughts on my other plans apart from the RAID?

Thanks.

 

I'm not familiar with the inside of that model but google will get you the service manual, which shows all the steps you'll need for each component upgrade.

The drives should be easy. Half the ram should also be easy (the two that are on the underside as opposed to those under the keyboard).

Repasting isn't the hardest thing in the world and may be worth it if you're seeing high temps and will be in there anyway. There's probably thousands of how-to videos on YouTube.


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The only way you will see a performance increase from your HD is to use faster SSD's than the ones you have now. The Samsung 840 Pro's that you mentioned are excellent drives and should provide you with years of service. I wouldn't bother to raid them on a laptop. I highly doubt there's a decent RAID controller on your motherboard with it's own dedicated cache. But if you do RAID them, it would be interesting to see how a clone from a single drive would work out when the target drive is 2 SSD's in RAID 0. My gut tells me it won't work, but my inner geek says to try it and see what happens.

With regards to the mSATA drive, by all means pick one up. It's a great way to augment internal storage without taking hardly any space at all. But I would install / clone windows on the primary SSD(s) first, then install the mSATA drive.

RE: RAM. Are you pushing the 16GB you have now? If so, then upgrade. If not, then don't. It's your call, but spending money on RAM if you don't need it just seems like a waste to me.

Good luck with your machine, hope it works out for you.

 

Changing the RAM and HDs is very easy, and one of the great selling points for the Precision line. I think most of us buy the minimum RAM from Dell, and instantly stick four new sticks in once it arrives!!

Thanks for your feedback, it is appreciated.

I am glad you think the new HDs will help improve performance. The SSDs I have now are fine, but tech has moved on quite a bit since I got them, and the Samsung 840 EVOs and 850 PROs are supposed to be extremely fast. Considering I can get 2x 512GB Samsung 840 EVOs for just under the price of 1x 512GB Samsung 850 Pro, I would probably go for the 840s.

Your comments on the mSATA make me think that there is little point in installing one because if I have 2x 512GB SSDs or even 2x 1TB SSDs then storage is not really an issue at all. I always move around with a 2TB external HD to back up with anyway.

As for whether I push the 16GB of RAM. To be honest, I am not sure. I may do when I am video editing - especially when it comes to rendering - but whether upgrading to 32GB of the newer RAM would make any difference I have no idea.

In summary, new SSDs sound like a great idea, RAM possibly - but only just and there seems little point to get an mSATA HD.

Thanks for all the feedback, and if anyone else has any ideas please do let me know. I have been surprised that more people have said RAID 0 won't make a difference, but that's one less thing for me to think about!

 

I recently upgraded my CPU to an i7-2960XM. Was a Dual core 17-2640.

That allowed 32GB 1600 Ram, so I added 2 x 8 to the 16 already installed

Replaced the main mechanical drive with an 1TB Samsung EVO 840. Put old main in as the secondary for now.

This machine ROCKS!!! And runs plenty cool enough still.