New M6500 Discussion Thread

In "Device Manger" under "Other devices"
I have;
"Mass Storage Controller" with a yellow warning icon - driver will not install / not found

Running Windows 7 64 bit

Have only one hard disk drive a Seagate Momentus XT 500gb

Anyone have had the same issue?

 

Try to install Texas Instruments PCI8412 Memory Card drivers from Dell site ...

 

Thank You!

Installed and issue resolved.

Regards

Joseph

 

Parts arrived today so hopefully my long on-going frustration will finally end.

 

Hi gang,

I have a SATA drive configuration question. I tried sifting through the thread to see if my question has been answered, but could not determine. Anyways:

I run a Dell M6300 currently with 8GB RAM, the internal (320GB?) HD, and an external 2TB drive on a eSATA express card.

I run VMWare Workstation, with my VMs on the eSATA bus. I need to run Documentum (with supporting MS SQL DB) on this VM, and need as much performance a I can get.

Looking at the M6500, I am wondering if I can get as much or more performance with internal drives (the external eSATA is a pain for travel). I would want the OS (Win 7) on one drive, and VMs on another. Do I need to worry about both drives on the same bus? VMWare seems to like having the OS on a different bus than the VM.

I also want 16GB RAM (for performance as well).

Is the M6500 able to be configured well for the above?

Thanks in advance - Matt

 

The m6500 is perfect for that case.

You can e.g. use an SSD for your OS and another internal 7200rpm hard disk for the VMs. 2.5 7200rpm hard disks are available at 500, 640 or 750GB currently. Should give you some space for VMs.

Be sure to take a quad core machine to get for DIMM slots to get up to 16 GB with 4 * 4GB. Dual cores only support 2 DIMMs.

 

I don't know the M6300, so I can't compare. Does it still have PATA HDDs? (I can hardly believe that.)
SATA drives always have their own BUS. So there is no BUS sharing. The poor data rate of your eSATA HDD is most likely due to a slow controller in the external casing or the limited speed of the Expresscard PCI.

I do something similar with my M6500 like you intend to do. I have 3 internal HDDs (1 HDD in optical bay caddy) and they are all only limited by the drive speed itself, not by the interface. One of those drives is almost exclusively for VirtualBox images and together with 12GB RAM it works very well.
However, it's not entirely comparable since I neither run Windows nor VMWare and I don't have a single very demanding VM but multiple ones with mostly light or mid-range demands (which are mostly on CPU or RAM, seldomly on HDD).

 

Thanks SvenC and debguy!

I was also curious about SSD - no performance concern there?

 

The current generation of mSATA cards are just as fast as the 2.5" variety.

Intel's SSD 310: G2 Performance in an mSATA Form Factor - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

 

Has anyone had the opportunity to pop one of these in the 6500's minipci spot?
Any fit issues? Looks like they're available on the egg now....