Latitude 7450 Owners' Thread

Got my new laptop

Liking it so far - reasonably light (however at 1.7kgs it's still on the heavy side), no backlight bleed and silent fan (except when taxing the GPU). I'm getting ~6 hours battery life without putting in any effort to save power (except disable display power saving in intel options because I hate adaptive contrast)



Specs;

i7-5600U
16GB RAM (added 8GB of crucial DDR3 myself)
512GB Crucial MX200 SSD (upgraded myself, originally came with a 128GB PM851)
GeForce 840M (certainly far from the fastest notebook GPU, but great for casual gaming like CS:GO, DoTA etc.)
1080p IPS antiglare (no backlight bleed )

 

I called Dell for a replacement and they gave my the runaround - wanted me to reinstall drivers etc then got disconected. Re-installing drivers, windows etc has nothing to do with backlight bleed but I know the phone techs have to run through their scripts.... Contacted Dell again for the return and they offered $100 to keep the laptop and contact tech support again. Called again and they are sending out a replacement screen. After the $100 refund, this laptop will end up costing me around $740.

 

I have looked through the various posts here regarding the e7450 and have 2 questions that I didn't see directly addressed (unless I completely missed it). My e7450 config comes with a 80GB mSATA drive attached to a special mounting bracket. A 80GB SSD is too small for any kind of storage so I would like to replace it with a basic PNY brand Optima 240GB SATA III SSD. Can the 240GB drive just be plugged into the existing connector and then placed into the drive bay? I know I will need to come up with some method of securing the 240Gb drive so it doesn't move. Also, once the 80GB mSATA is removed can it be placed into the WWAN bay and used as a boot drive? That would allow both drives to be used: 80Gb mSATA for boot and 240GB SATA for storage. If this is not possible, then I can just use the 240GB for both boot and storage provided it can actually be connected.

 

From

I do not think the WWAN slot will work for an SSD requiring a sata controller - see earlier in the thread. The pny optima will fit and work but you might need a caddy for it since you have an mSata drive currently. I am not sure if the caddy for the mSata will work with a standard 2.5" drive.

 

Thank you for the information. I will check to see if I can come up with a suitable caddy for the PNY drive.

 

Alternatively, buy a higher capacity mSATA SSD. They are available up to 1TB. If you also get an mSATA - USB adapter you will be able to clone the existing SSD onto the new one.

John

 

Thanks for the tip. That's an alternative, but I already have a spare 240GB SSD and a SATA/USB cable for the cloning, so there would be no expense involved. I also have a couple of old laptops that I might be able to snag some parts from to make the SSD caddy. One old Toshiba laptop used a pair of silicone rubber shock dampers around the HDD instead of a caddy so those might fit the SSD. I'll let folks know how it goes once the e7450 arrives.

 

If the E7450 is the same as the E7440 then a 7mm drive (if that's what your SSD is) will be a tight fit but does work (check the E7440 thread). IIRC, Dell uses the5mm thick single platter 500GB HDDs in the non-SSD version.

This raises the question of why does Dell use an mSATA, not a 2.5" SSD? For the E7440 one explanation is that the same SSD could be used in both the main drive bay and the WWAN slot but this doesn't apply to the E7450. mSATA in a plastic frame also gives a small weight saving compared to a 2.5" drive.

John

 

Hey John,

I'll try my 7mm 240GB SSD first and post what I find out. Looking at the photos it shouldn't be a problem fashioning a bracket for it in my shop. Stay tuned...

-=wild_mt

 

My guess is they wanted to use the same SSD brand and models (to get better volume pricing) in both the E7250 and E7450. But they also wanted to offer a 2.5 inch HDD option the E7450 so they could hit a lower price point. So mSATA + an interposer lets them do that.

I imagine that also at this point M.2 WWAN cards are cheaper than the mPCIe cards that were used before. It would have been nice if they would have wired it up to use M.2 SATA cards though!

Oh, and 7MM does work fine. The metal bracket that comes with the 500GB HDD holds a 7MM snugly. The part number shown on the metal bracket is 4X5X8 if that helps.