New M6500 Discussion Thread

That's unfortunate. I never asked for the bracket, but it was included in the machine, and inside the unoccupied bay. Mine was a Covet, so I'm not sure if that made a difference if yours wasn't. Mine was ordered in late April and arrived two weeks later in May.

If these were actual Dell reps you talked to, then I'm a little shocked.

Frankly, if they weren't shipped with the machine, I'd call their bluff. Order the machine, and then offer up the fact that if they weren't willing to ship a $10 (and overpriced at that) bracket, they can expect their $5K machine to be dropped off in the mail for a full refund under the 30 day policy. They can eat the loss in the new sale price when it goes for less on the Dell outlet.

But I'm getting crotchety in my old age, and besides that I don't think that it would happen.

As far as ram sockets, you don't "order" those either. My machine was ordered with 2GB of ram. 2x1GB modules. Plugged my own 2x4GB kits in for a full 16GB compliment after the fact. Course, I did specify a quad core 920XM in the configuration.

Sounds like you need to find a new rep within Dell.

 

Interesting. I personally can't explain why you'd need to jump through those hoops to get the drive working. My personal experience is a little skewed in that, as I mentioned, I moved the mechanical to bay 2 and installed the SSD to bay 1 before ever attempting the windows install to the new drive. I picked the first drive, which was obviously completely unpartitioned and unformatted. 7 did it's thing as far as allocating the small "first" partition for the Microsoft recovery voodoo, and then the OS install/main partition immediately after that. And like subsequent posts indicate, it was aligned properly, as Win7 should handle that and did for me apparently. AS SSD actually indicates the same in it's results window.... it's just a larger value divisible by 4096.

 

Well, looks like after a long 3 weeks I'll finally be receiving my 3rd Replacement Covet. I really hope Dell took the time to test and actually look at this one before it went out the door.

 

I did the same thing you describe on my first try. Don't know. But everything is great now though. When prices drop down the road I'll get a second SSD and replace the spindle drive. SvenC installed the same way as me so I'm not alone in this, but not sure if he was forced to...some others too (would like to find out, mammoth thread)....I'm going to look into that further. TRIM is functioning, all is well. EDIT: by the way, during my windows install the first drive, disk 0, was indeed my SSD located in Bay 2.

re: Alignment....Paragon tool just said my drives weren't 'optimally' aligned. Now they are according to the software. Seems like a very nice, first rate tool. I'd recommend grabbing it while it's still free. FWIW.

re: Bracket: I had the bracket come with the machine in the 2nd HDD bay. It consists of a metal bracket, 4 screws to attach the HD to the bracket from the sides, and an interposer, i.e. adapter/connector that slides on the HDD connector. I did NOT ask for it so I don't know what's going on with this.

 

Good luck with this! Give us a report.

 

I don't see why the casing colour should make a difference here.

They surely were. And to prevent any misconceptions, they were very very cooperative. All trouble I had was due to poor technical solutions in Dells ordering mechanisms and in-house software design. All the humans I talked to acted just like one would expect from an excellent support (ok, maybe except for that second technician who replaced my board).

No, that's not necessary. Dell just has do do their homework behind the scenes.
One important fact why I decided to buy the M6500 was because it was advertised to be sold with Linux. But it seems like nowhere in the world this is actually true. No guy from Dell knew about this option although it is clearly stated on their site. And even after they tried really hard none of my reps was able to configure it with RHEL. They even contacted their bosses. So I had to order it with FreeDOS, what wasn't easy either.
Since then I don't believe in what Dell states on their website until I've seen it by myself or heard it by someone who is independent.

disclaimer: This is not intended to be Windows (software) bashing, even it it may sound like this.
I don't understand why this software can't tell you what exactly is going on there. The "optimal alignment" is no magic mystery. An HDD has sectors, an SSD has flash cells. The "optimal alignment" is nothing else than a partition layout which defines the partition borders to match a block/sector border and file system clusters whose size is a multiple of the sector or cell size. Why can't this software tell you something like "Your HDD has a sector size of 4kB, but your file system uses 512B clusters. This should be changed."?
If the tools under Linux wouldn't give me that information, I would clearly call them crap, but not "a very nice, first rate tool".

 

you know what they say about opinions, right? Should I believe my defrag tools or have them prove it to me, say windows defrag? It was free and well written compared to programs I've seem over the years....hard to believe it's a spoof after finding out that some hard drives are out of alignment.

But yeah, that's the sort of info you'd get out of a linux terminal....but this is windows.....lol

EDIT: Sorry, forgot to mention...it gives you the cluster info, etc...during the preboot work.....but at that point you're commited to the program. I have no regrets after testing it.

 

Well, the replacement is in and all seems to be running as it should. I'm hoping I won't have to worry about anything else now and will be looking forward to finish reinstalling the rest of my software and get this thing back to work.

 

True enough. Though when I ordered nothing was available in the covet packages except for quad core options... which would practically guarantee not being given the wrong chipset.

Well, I'd argue that apparently it is necessary. The reps you've talked to are giving you answers that seem a little off, if not outright wrong. Dell is a corporation. Corporations can hire questionable employees. You seem to have drawn the shortest straw unfortunately.

Having used a self installed Debian (not ubuntu or any other amalgamation) thinkpad for about five years, I'm not sure why preinstalled Linux would be a deal maker and/or breaker for you frankly. I suppose hardware support out of the box would be a nice to have, but I don't know many people that would hinge the purchase decision on it if a Linux OS was the end goal.

 

I took a look to this software. The good point is that it alligns partitions inside virtual containers and the host. Maybe that's the reason why your drives were not optimally aligned.

However I went to their forum in order to read user comments. Some posts are quite scary, I will make sure to do a complete backup before trying it...