M6800 Owners' Thread

Got a good deal on a Samsung QVO... I do love how the price has fallen from over $1600 to about $500 over the past two years or so.

 

Yes, yes, we do need 4TB storage!!!!!

Come on poppa, under $250 for 4TB ssds....I can wait another two years...

 

Yeah, you and I aren't in the "most people" class I was referring to.

Sad thing about 2.5" 9.5mm (hard drives) at this point is it occupies a niche space. Basically... that space is older or cheaper laptops.
If a desktop computer is going to have a hard drive, it will be 3.5" (you can always get the same capacity for cheaper at 3.5").
If a server is going to have a hard drive or an array of drives, it will also be 3.5", or maybe 2.5" 15mm.
Of course, companies are still interested in producing higher-capacity drives, but the market for large drives has been moving to the data center. So, 3.5" or bust.

(You do see desktops with 2.5" SSDs. Unlike hard drives, there's really no economical reason to produce a 3.5" flash drive unless it is very high capacity, and 2.5" drives can easily be mounted where 3.5" drives are expected. Most 2.5" SSDs are mostly empty space these days; the form factor is just used for physical backwards compatibility.)

On the plus side, M.2 2280 is becoming the de facto standard for flash drives across the board, netbook to desktop to data center. So as flash drive capacities increase for the data center, you can also take advantage of this for your laptop. (Assuming your laptop is new enough to support M.2.)

 

Does $349.99 qualify? That's Samsung's MSRP at this point, if you shop around you can find it a bit cheaper. Even on Amazon I am seeing it for $340, eBay has some sellers going a bit cheaper than that.
QVO might be low-end when it comes to flash, but I was replacing a 2TB Seagate HDD, and when you just need high capacity more than high speed, it's a pretty good value.

[Edit] Messed up link.

 

I only care about data reliability and data capacity (and price).
Speed - so long as it's as fast a 5400rpm hdd, I'm fine.
Which SSD technologies should I be looking at? There was something about TLC/QLC

 

SSDs are almost automatically more reliable than HDDs. No moving parts = much much much less chance of random failure. Also, any modern SSD is automatically way faster than any 2.5" HDD, especially when it comes to random I/O performance.
For the cheapest drives of course you want to be looking at SATA and not NVMe. (Not that you have a choice for the M6800 anyway.)

I've really only been paying attention to Samsung. Everyone seems to like them the best. They seem to be competitive price-wise. I have probably ten Samsung SSDs in various systems at this point and I have yet to have one fail on me. (I purchased a single Intel SSD for a family member's laptop and that one failed within a year. I did get it replaced under warranty at no cost and it has been fine since then. But based on my admittedly limited data set, I'm hesitant to try them again and I'll stick with Samsung.)

On the SATA side, your choices are basically Samsung 860 Pro, 860 EVO, and 860 QVO. These are in order of both price and endurance. (Also speed, maybe, but these days any of these drives can pretty well saturate the SATA bus; you won't see a big speed difference.) Note, Samsung 860 EVO is also available in mSATA form, if you haven't used the mSATA slot in your M6800 yet. (Only up to 1 TB though.)

Drives have moved through SLC, MLC, TLC, and QLC. (Single-level cell = 1 bits per cell, multi-level = 2 bits, triple-level = 3 bits, quad-level = 4 bits). Basically as the bits per cell goes up, the cost goes down but so does the life span. 860 QVO is QLC, 860 EVO is TLC, and 860 Pro is MLC.

For flash, some people get nervous about the fact that the drive can only take a limited amount of writes before the flash cells start to wear out. What you have to realize is, even though the number of writes is limited, it is still absurdly high for modern drives so it's not really anything that needs worrying about. The Samsung drives are warrantied for a particular amount of time (years) and TBW (terrabytes written). The Samsung 860 QVO has a 3 year warranty, and 360 TBW per TB capacity. (So, the 1TB drive has a 360 TBW warranty while the 4TB drive has 1440 TBW.) Basically, if you have the 1TB drive, and you manage to write 360 terrabytes to it before your 3 years is up, then your warranty will be expired early. To write 360 TB in 3 years you would have to average around 336 GB written per day, every day, which I think for most people is a bit of a stretch.

860 EVO has a warranty of 600 TBW per TB capacity, and 860 PRO is 1200 TBW per TB capacity. Also, the EVO and Pro drives have a 5 year warranty instead of 3 year. So, there you can see life span decreasing as bits per cell goes up. QVO is the cheapest. Samsung offers up to 4TB for all three of these (I believe they are the only manufacturer with 4TB drives widely available). Stress tests normally show these drives lasting well beyond the warrantied TBW rating. In ideal circumstances, a drive that is wearing out becomes read-only and you can still get the data off of it. I haven't run one to the end of its life to test this, yet, though.

 

So Seagate 2TB SSHD is on sale on Newegg for $62 today, I'm probably gonna get two.

What hardware do I need to swap my dvd drive for an HDD?

 

Something like this. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004XIUQYA
It needs to be for a 9.5mm optical drive bay, and, it needs to support 9.5mm hard drives.
You just have to remove the small metal piece from the back of your optical drive that takes the screw allowing it to be attached to the system, and then attach it to this caddy. (That will make sense if you just take your optical drive out and look at the back.)

 

Hi all,

My M6800 is still going pretty strong with 2+ years daily use as a 3D CAD workstation.

However I do get pretty regular BSODs and I thought that it could be a good idea to go for a fresh install - it's Windows 10 (always has been) and I don't have physical installation media.

I wondered if some kind soul could please advise best practice for a clean install...Windows Advanced Startup, Dell OS recovery tool, or something else.

Thanks in advance.

 

You can create your own Windows 10 media. Use this tool and it will build a bootable DVD or USB drive for you.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Make sure the system is in AHCI mode. If it is in RAID mode, you will have to manually load the Intel Rapid Storage "F6" driver before Windows will see any drives to install onto.

You can install from this and it should automatically pick up your Windows 10 key from the BIOS. You can then install the drivers from Dell (support.dell.com). Really, you don't have to do much. This system is old enough that Windows should have what it needs to get the system online built-in (WiFi or Ethernet driver). Run Windows Update once and it should find most or all of the remaining drivers. Install the touchpad driver from Dell if you want the GUI control panel thing, and the ControlVault driver if you have a fingerprint reader. (And the latest BIOS if you don't have it installed already.)