New M6500 Discussion Thread

I use the Tumi Deluxe Wheeled leather case.

Number 96127

It you have a local store you can find some good deals.

 

Hi guys, I'm not sure if this has been covered or not, but it relates to the M6500 and USB 3.0. I got the laptop for work and recently acquired a WD My Book Essential (with USB 3.0 available). I enabled the USB 3.0 option in the BIOS and updated the NEC USB 3.0 driver through the Dell website; however, no matter what I'm copying, the speed doesn't go past ~35MB/s.

I've done some Google research and I have yet to find the answer to my problem! I'm not expecting speeds of 400MB/s as advertised but at the very least I was expecting speeds of at least 100. Am I missing something? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Just as a side note, the hard drive that came with the laptop is the Seagate ST9750420AS Momentus ones that I believe have a 3Gb/s transfer rate.

Edit: So I've switched the hard drive policy to 'Better Performance' and I'm getting about ~55MB/s and I think I could probably get faster speeds. Also, I'm copying off a network NAS system through ethernet cable (1Gb/s network controller).

 

I'm using the same setup (M6500, USB3, WD My Book Essential).
Just did a quick test: 75-95MB/s (average >80 MB/s)

Did you try newest firmware and drivers (not from DELL):

SONY/NEC/RENESAS Drivers & Firmwares

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Alex

 

Have you benched copying directly off of the M6500 to and from the drive instead of putting the network connection in the chain? The gigabit connection is certainly your bottleneck here in that you're never going to get anywhere close to theoretical throughput off that interface to your machine in the first place.

 

Thanks mate, I'll give that a shot.

I was told by a friend that this might be the case, I'll give it a shot and report back.

 

I got My Book Essential with USB 3.0 too. I am using the latest driver and firmware, the speed is only around 60M/s. Maybe SSD can reach ups to 100m/s. Overall it is slower than esata.

 

Thanks - although the Tumi is a bit above the price range for me.

 

Can anyone give me a layman's description or comparison of i7 processors, specifically the i7-2820M at 2.3GHz and the i7-2920M Extreme Edition at 2.5GHz?

Reason: the M6600 I received was ordered with the faster processor, but delivered with the slower. Now I have to decide on a new machine, or just a refund of the $ difference. I have a nice, working M6600 in my hands now, which is significant.

Thanks - Matt

UPDATE: Found these two threads here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...-i7-2820qm-paper-nothing-price-something.html

http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...grades/545462-2720qm-vs-2820qm-vs-2920xm.html

I'm sticking with the 2820QM and getting the $$ diff refunded.

 

So I've given it a go and the speeds I get from HDD to external HDD is above 100. For some of them it fluctuates between 100 and 110, and for others I've seen it reach 130.

Try this. Pop into 'Device Manager', under 'Disk Drives', RMB the external HDD and jump into the 'Policies' tab. Here, select 'Best Performance' and this should hopefully speed things up. As a consequence of doing this though, you can't just pull out your hard drive anymore, it has to be 'ejected safely' otherwise you run a real risk of corrupting your hard drive.

After I did this, copying from a network drive sped up from ~30MB/s to ~50-60MB/s; and from internal HDD, it went from ~30MB/s to 100+ MB/s.

 

Since I cannot get the Intel 310 series in my region. I just need to upgrade the processor only. The question is...

What is the fastet processor upgrade available now in the market that is compatible with this unit?