New M6500 Discussion Thread

Actually I have 4 drives: The mini card SSD, two 2.5" HDDs in the regular slots and one in an HDD caddy in the ODD bay.

I was under the same impression so I set my 1st and 2nd HDD to RAID mode when I installed the mini card SSD but my BIOS didn't detect the SSD. So I updated my BIOS from A00 to A06 but still noch change. Then I reverted my controller back to AHCI mode and the SSD suddenly appeared in the boot menu.

 

Do you know how to manually set the fans to run at full speed?

 

1. Hold Fn + Shift and type 15324. The scroll LED should blink now.
2. Press Fn + r
3. Set the fans to whatever you like. (warning: setting them to too low RPM can severly damage your hardware)

You'll have to repeat that procedure every time you cut your M6500 from power completely.

 

Thanks
I've found this
diefer.de - The 15324 trick and one happy E4300 owner

What I have to type to set the fans to run at full speed?

 

Basically you have to maximize the fan RPM. I have no idea about the maximum value in the BIOS menu, just try it!

As for i8kfan (the diefer.de tool) you have three settings for each fan: 0 = off, 1 = slow, 2 = fast; Fan1 in the M6500 is the GPU fan, fan2 is the CPU fan.
I only use it from the command line so I dont know about the GUI. I've heard that it doesn't work under Win 7 but 've never tried.

 

there is a little problem.
I can't exit this window. When I press ENTER the screen blinks on and off with different colours.

 

I can confirm this, when you setup your machine in AHCI mode, you can then use the 3 drives in non-RAID mode at once.

But like you said, if you do use RAID mode, your 2.5" disks need to be setup as a RAID 0 or RAID 1.

I tried both modes, and opted for using RAID mode, instead of AHCI.

 

After much fiddling with the new computer I managed to get it setup just the way I wanted it.

I first setup Windows 7 Pro 64-bits from scratch, then installed all the drivers (following Dell's instructions).

Then I installed two 2.5" SATA hard drives and ran the RAID setup utility from the BIOS screen (Ctrl + I).

Thanks y'all for all the advice.

 

@INERDTIA:

I think you may still be missing something important. Or I am... I'm far less expert than many here, so I could be wrong about this. Someone will correct me if so.

My understanding was that if you are using an SSD, you really want to get the system to pass it "TRIM commands" (meaning to operate the SSD efficiently - it's way inefficient if the system doesn't know its an SSD.). But my understanding was that the only way to get the system to treat the SSD as an SSD was to change your SATA configuration from RAID to AHCI.

It sounds like you got everything working, but in RAID mode. I believe that means that your SSD is being [inefficiently] operated as a hard drive, when a different setting could give you improved performance.

Hope this helps, and if it's wrong, please somebody elaborate. I have been of the belief that I can have RAID *or* efficient SSD operation with TRIM commands, but not both. I'd love to be proven wrong on that one!

xPat

 

Speedy, what kind of paste do you use? Also, what did you make your shim from?
I've tried everything and cannot get my 920xm to stay anywhere near as cool as yours - i hit 95c in prime @ 2.8Ghz on all 4 cores and I've re-pasted it twice already. The only thing I can think of is maybe your shim makes a bit of difference?