M6500 with standalone mSATA?

Hello,

I have a M6500 but, I can't seem to locate a M6500 Owners Thread...I searched and couldn't find anything..weird.

either way, I have a question....I am wanting to install a mSATA drive into the FCM slot in my M6500 and I do not want or need any other additional drives....Is it possible to only install the one mSATA and still have the computer recognize and boot from the mSATA?

Also, would any newer 2015/2016 year model mSATA work, say this one? https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-850-...?ie=UTF8&qid=1477637769&sr=8-1&keywords=msata

Thanks, in advance!

 

here it is... nearly 650 pages of gloriousness

http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/new-m6500-discussion-thread.439109/

Regarding mSATA which was cutting edge at the time the m6500 debut, it requires another drive to act as the primary disk in order for it (the mSATA) to be seen in BIOS and OS. But you may discover workaround solutions nearer the end of that thread if I recall.

here is a starting point for you perhaps, from within that thread

New M6500 Discussion Thread

 

It will work with the mSATA as the only solo drive. It only becomes a problem when u add more drives to it. For some reason, the BIOS will remove the mSATA as a bootable drive.

 

Hmm. I have three HDD's in my M6500 but boot from the mSATA just fine. It does, however, show up in Linux as /dev/sdd rather than sda.

 

Hey guys, this thread is about 5 months old, but I had a QUICK question on this issue. I have an m6500 and am interested in loading an mSATA SSD for data storage only. There seems to be a real struggle to get it to boot from the mSATA, but does anyone think it will be as difficult to add the mSATA by itself and get it recocginzed and formatted NTFS for storage purposes? Thanks for the help if you have any

 

Ok I will give it a shot here. I'm recalling it from when I did several years back... so fingers crossed!

If you want to boot from the mSATA SSD with no other hard drives, then you will need to enable the RAID function. Once that is done, you will find that the mSATA drive shows up as a bootable device.

However, once you install an additional hard disk then your boot up will fail as the mSATA drive will no longer be showing up as a bootable drive.

So you need to decide which path you are going now and choose whether to install an additional hard disk now and not later.

 

But I don't want to boot from the mSATA. I just want to use an mSATA SSD for extra storage space. I read on a few threads on here about the struggles to boot from it. But if you just wanna use one for storage of files/data, is there the same hurdles to jump thru to make that happen? I haven't seen any info yet for using an mSATA SSD with the m6500 for storage only.

 

Unless you have lots of small files, or random access is particularly important, using a small SSD for this is not particularly efficient.

The way I boot my mSATA on my M6500 is to have another disk installed, with GRUB (I'm running Linux, but GRUB can boot Windows too) on that other disk's boot block. Grub is able to boot the mSATA just fine.

 

If you want to use the mSATA SSD just for storage, there's nothing additional you need to do. Just install it and off you go.

You don't even need to enable the RAID option. Just make sure the BIOS can detect it in the firmware setup and you are good to go.

The only thing stopping you from using your mSATA SSD is an incompatibility with the M6500; which is a tad rare.

 

Okay, I like the sound of that. I know it isn't the most efficient thing, but it will add 512gb of internal space, and I could use it. I could put my audio work on it and then use my other drive strictly for video stuff. I do a lot of both. And I hate having external drives plugged into the laptop except temporarily for backing up my data. I figure, since the slot's available, why not take advantage?