M6800 Owners' Thread

The M6800 has an option for a mini-card SSD is this the same as an mSATA?

 

Thanks so much for your replies. The M6800 has so many options....Would it be possible to with a 512 mini card SSD for OS/Programs and immediate working files, and then back up to a larger Primary and Secondary HD in RAID 1. I have read that larger SSDs are faster, not sure how much difference between 256 and 512. I am looking at running this machine for 3 years, so I don't want to get into the situation of running out space. If I go with RAID 1 scenario, what is the best option 750 GB 7200 rpm, 1 TB 5400 rpm, or 1 TB Hybrid HD. Is there any issue booting off of the mini-card? The tech specs state that all four drives are 6Gb/s?

 

I've had this a number of times before ... with faulty AMD desktop video cards. Common problem. I'm not saying AMD cards are bad (nVidia cards fail too), just that when the 3D portion of AMD cards fails, it crashes the driver and you get that message.

Time to take a photo or screen dump, report the problem to Dell, and ask for a new video card.

 

Hello Friends,

I receives my Precision M6800 today.

unfortunately, does not include Carrying Case.
Any recommendation are welcome.

By the way, This is my 1st post in this forum and newbie at here.:hi2:

 

Yes. The 'm' in mSATA stands for mini.

Yes, you can use two HDDs (or SSDs) in RAID1 (= mirror) or RAID0 (= striping), and use the minicard as a single drive.

RAID1 gives you the added security that your data is safe in case one of the drives fails, because each drive contains an exact copy of your data. Since the M6800 uses hardware RAID, the performance of a RAID1 array is the same as with a single drive.

RAID0 gives you added performance, but if one drive fails all data is lost, because the data that remains on one drive is useless without the second drive.

You could also replace the optical drive with an HDD caddy for a total of three 2.5" drive bays, so you have the option to use a RAID5 array as well.

No. I have run an M6800 with only a minicard installed and also with a minicard + an HDD. Like I said before, you can specify which drive to boot from in the BIOS.

My advice is to install the OS with only the minicard installed. Remove the other drives to avoid installing on the wrong drive. After you installed the OS, you can put the other drives back in.

Alternatively, you can disable the SATA ports in the BIOS if you don't want to take the drives out.

If the other drives don't have an OS on them, you can boot the machine without making any changes to the BIOS.
If (one of) the other drives contains an OS, you go into the BIOS before booting any OS. In the BIOS, you see a list of detected bootable partitions. You can specify which partition to boot from by moving it to the top of the list. You can also delete the boot items that you don't want from the list. Please note that this doesn't delete the partition from the disk, just from the boot list.

Yes. Like I said before, all drive bays of the M6800 are SATA3, which means they can run at either 3 Gb/s (for older drives) or 6 Gb/s.

 

Performance is usually exactly the same. The only difference is the physical dimensions of the drive. Both mSATA and 2.5" SSDs are limited in speed by the SATA interface.

 

I have a setup that isn't too much different myself. I have a 240GB MSATA SSD for boot and a few games and other programs and such. I then have a 1TB Hybrid drive (the one that came with the laptop) as the secondary drive for the rest of my programs and stuff that I use on a regular basis. Then I have another 1TB 5400 RPM drive out of my sister's laptop that we upgraded to a hybrid drive that I use for pictures, music, videos, etc where access time/speed doesn't matter. It works really well, and having my boot drive and my data drive separate on computers over the years has saved my data countless times, and I wouldn't have it any other way, especially if it were my only computer and I wouldn't be able to put the hard drive in another computer to try and recover data should something happen.

 

Performance is usually a hair better, because 2.5" drives usually are using more NANDs.

Currently the spec info on Liteon L6m and L6s is removed from Liteon site - but I remember performance of L6s was a bit better.

 

error404ts, did you try the ICC profile, and did it help? I am thinking about getting the M6800 but now that I've seen this thread I'm not so sure...

 

Has anyone given thought to putting in one of the new Maxwell 980m's into an M6800.
I don't think a new Dell Precision mobile workstation will be made available for a while, so upgrades to the old units are looking better