New M6500 Discussion Thread

Thanks Bokeh!

 

Firstly, My 3 month old M6500 is just fine now.

The purpose of this post is to help someone else who may have similar issues.

I have read through most of the 400+ pages in this thread and have not seen anyone post anything similar, though I could have overlooked relevant posts. Of course, this would tend to suggest that the two problems I have experienced are rare.

Great place to learn and share laptop info, BTW . . .

My M6500 came equipped with Win XP (my choice,) i7-920XM, Quadro 3800M and 4 GB memory. I have the largest Samsung SSD and I set it up in encrypted mode. The system came with the Wave Systems security suite installed.

I suspect the above combination is not common and this is why the problems I experienced have not been generally seen. {I will update to Win7 in the near term.}

Issue 1: Can't burn a disk.

When I first received the M6500, I could not burn disks with the slot-drive. I had a Dell tech come visit and he changed out the drive to no avail. He next recommended swapping out the mainboard. I chose not to accept a mainboard swap.

These are the relevant syslog errors and they do seem to suggest a disk controller issue:



and:




I decided to wait for a new BIOS (I had A02 installed and as it turned out, A04 did not have any noticeable effect.) I decided to experiment and test various hypotheses.

The system came with Roxio CD Creator 10.3 installed. I prefer Nero and so I purchased and installed Nero 9. I hadn't tried the CD/DVD burner until after installing Nero. Once I removed Nero, Roxio worked fine and the drive performed as expected. Burning was no longer an issue. There appears to be some conflict between the two brands/versions of burner software on my M6500 as configured, though I have had Roxio and Nero work w/o conflict on other systems.

Issue 2: Intermittent Failure to Boot Properly

Every 6 or 10 boot-ups the computer was unusable. The system booted up; there was a normal desktop presentation; Intel Rapid Storage Icon had a yellow tell-tale warning and the task bar showed an hourglass. The mouse functioned, the Task Manager did not function properly and the only way to gain useful access to the computer was to crash it and reboot.

As it turns out, I do not need a new mainboard. I just needed a little patience.

At the end of the boot-up process, while at the login screen, if I immediately (as in less than 5 seconds,) enter my User ID and Password, the computer does not boot properly. The failure mode is repeatable.

If I simply pause to give the boot process a few seconds to get further along - for some action to complete on the SSD - the computer runs flawlessly 100% of the time.

It seems that after each failure, I tended to be more patient on the reboot and so the recovery was pretty much assured, though I did not understand why.

While I have not got at the root cause of the problem, the workaround is very simple.

It has been a few weeks since I have had any issues. I am loving the M6500 so long as I give it an extra five or ten seconds before logging into Windows.

The problem or issue may or may not exist under Win 7. I'll soon find out.

Hope this helps someone else.

Regards,

Joe

 

Anyone remember this?:

Ok, I got this caddy a month ago or so, but unfortunately I never had my M6500 and my toolbox in the same place. Now I do. Sounds strange? It is!

This caddy, which is praised in every review is quite poorly manufactured.
1st the plastic bezel is too big, about 0.5mm in height and in width. So it just didn't fit. Therefore I needed my toolbox where I have my triangular file and removed the extra plastic.
Assuming that this should do, I unscrewed the small bracket from the optical drive which fixes it in the laptop and attached it to the HDD caddy. Then I inserted the caddy and found that the hole in the bracket and the screw hole didn't match exactly. I knew it couldn't be the bezel anymore so I decided to dig deeper and found that 2nd the S-ATA port of the caddy is slightly too short, meaning that the jack in the laptop can't be inserted completely, which in turn means that the whole caddy protrudes a tiny bit (less than 1mm). I found a workaround by not tightening the screws of the bracket completely. This allows me to fix it anyway.
And 3rd, as a side note, the caddy-LED that I guess should indicate access to the drive doesn't work at all. But frankly, I don't care about that LED.

Oh, before I forget: Apart from that, the caddy and the drive in it work fine. So to conclude it: A good idea done bad.

 

Hi debguy,

did you buy from the US shop or did you find that Caddy somewhere in the EU?

So this caddy helps to get a third hard disk into the m6500, right?

Did you measure the performance of the third disk?

If yes, could you please share which disk or SSD you use in that caddy and what transfer rates you get?

If all three disks have heavy IO, do they slow down each other? I am thinking about running different virtual machines from different disks to reduce the disk bottleneck. But I do not know SATA well enough to estimate if three disks attached to the SATA controller in the m6500 will all run simultaneously at their full speeds.

Thanks in advance

 

I got it from overseas.

Right.

Currently I have a WD3200BEVT in it. Here's a short benchmark:

Code:

debian820QM:/home/hikaru# hdparm -tT /dev/sdb1

/dev/sdb1:
 Timing cached reads:   17736 MB in  2.00 seconds = 8878.17 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  192 MB in  3.00 seconds =  63.94 MB/sec

This is normal for this drive. So no bottleneck in the caddy (at least not on this performance level).

Theroretically there shouldn't be any bottlenecks. SATA is completely parallel (in terms of different ports). There is no bus-sharing like in PATA.
Unfortunately I have no time right now to verify this. There might still be M6500-specific bottlenecks. I'll try to do some tests later this week.

 

I don't understand the different SATA stuff - are all compatible w/ the M6500? Looking at a SSD but some are SATA II others III

 

I'm using an Intel G2 X25M 160gb SSD and it's very fast, perfect w/r/t storage capacity. FWIW

 

The controller in the m6500 is SATA2 (least for the moment). SATA3 drives will work though. I'm using the SATA3 Crucial C300 256GB SSD for example.

 

Alright thanks. So, how long til M6600 with SATA III & Nvidia Quadro 5000M? Taking bets now.

Found this:

"Mobile workstation laptops with the Nvidia Quadro 5000M are expected to be available in the third quarter of 2010 from HP and Dell."

Can't be long. Be a nice XMAS gift.

Already curious to see if it'll be possible to pop into a M6500

 

Thanks a lot for the prompt and detailed answers. Sounds really promising.

I thought the S in SATA stands for serial, hence the thought about shared bandwidth for multiple devices. Different ports seems to be the key here. Well, I see again and again that I am much more a SW than a HW guy and that I am thankful that HW just works (most of the time)