New M6500 Discussion Thread

just wanted to let everyone know I dropped my m6500 from 3.5 feet on to a tile floor, bent up the metal in the corner of screen but it still works. I'll be calling up dell this week to see if repairing of the metal housing is covered under warranty, laptop still works perfectly. High five!

 

Monitor #3 is on the way. It's getting silly. No idea what is up. Trying to wake the U2711 from sleep is a major PIA with colors being washed out etc. Dell tech suggested sending the M6500 in to get checked out but since it's my sole daily workstation I declined.

 

Hi all,

bad news about 5000M availability. I quote Peter Ebringer (EMEA Client PreSales):

Cheers,
Alex

 

Greetings everyone,

I was going to order an m6500, but the mini-card SSD boot drive option seems to have disappeared from the order page. Does anyone know what's going on? Did these get discontinued because they didn't work well, or is this a temporary supply problem? I called Dell and of course the clueless idiot that answered the phone didn't know, didn't know who to ask, etc. Sigh.

Separately, I'm trying to figure out what the real deal is with number of 2.5" bays. Until the mini-card SSD option disappeared very recently, Dell was advertising the m6500 with THREE "drives", where one is the mini-card and the other two are 2.5" drives. But what doesn't add up is that one of the two 2.5" bays appears to be the optical drive bay with an adapter tray. That would make perfect sense if it was for an "extra" drive - but Dell is advertising it for RAID0 configuration of the two 2.5" drives. That would preclude taking the one in the optical bay out, even temporarily, since doing so would break the RAID0 stripe set and render the system unusable. In this configuration, does Dell send the buyer an external enclosure for their optical drive? Or are there really TWO 2.5" bays in the system in ADDITION to the one that can be put in the optical drive?

Thanks in advance for any guidance... It's a real shame that Dell can't even give us a straight answer on what they have for sale, and that we have to resort to forums like this to find out from other users what the hell Dell actually has to offer. Digital Equipment in the late '80s is the only company I know of that was decidedly more screwed up than Dell in this regard...

xPat

 

@xPat:
Don't worry about that miniSSD thing! Just order an M6500 without it and get an mSATA SSD from somewhere else. The Intel 310 for example works perfectly in the M6500.

Concerning the HDD options:
The M6500 has two regular slots for 2.5" HDDs. Plus you can add an mSATA SSD. This is usually what Dell calls the 3-drives setup.
Like in every other laptop you can of course also replace the optical drive with a HDD. You'll need a 3rd party extra caddy for that which has a SATA interface and is 9.5mm high.

All together works still fine. I even have a 5th drive attached via firewire and for backups I connect a 6th HDD via eSATA. So there should be enough options for storage.

 

...two question

the m7820 works good with cad & game ?

what model of backpack are you use with the m6500 ?

 

I've bought m6500 for games - it works perfectly.
I don't use cad.

For example Battlefield Bad Company 2 / Vietnam
1440x900 everything High, AA/AF x1
Multiplayer

Code:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
3302, 60000, 36, 62, 55.033
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
3634, 60000, 46, 72, 60.567

Vietnam

Code:

Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
4934, 60000, 43, 136, 82.233
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
5395, 60000, 59, 145, 89.917
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
5111, 60000, 63, 124, 85.183
Frames, Time (ms), Min, Max, Avg
4767, 60000, 46, 103, 79.450

Temps

 

Where to get Flash Cache Module(FCM) for M6500?

 

Any mSATA SSD should work.

 

Just wanted to update some old questions about the USB 3 connection and external hard drives. I am seeing 110-130 mb/sec transfer times over USB 3 with a 2tb Western Digital drive. The speed appears to be limited by the drive in the enclosure, not the USB 3 connection.