Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

I only use OCZ drives as I have a good working relationship with their support.
So for now the Vertex 200GB and then when the Vertex2 ships in the next month I will switch to that.

You want to install your OS using AHCI as mentioned its the only way TRIM support works on SSD.

If you are running mechanical like I am now and switching, I will just clone mechanical drive to the SSD with Ghost and thats it throw the cloned SSD drive in and its smooth sailing.

 

Just make sure that when your are cloning (I prefer Acronis 2010) to preserve that 100mb partition ahead of the partition you have Windows 7 installed on. This is called disk alignment and helps speed up the read/writes speeds are reduces excess wear on your SSD.

Google SSD disk alignment for all the info you'll ever want.

..... on another note..

still setting up my new M4500 - it arrived this morning.
First impressions are good..

I like the trackpad better than my M4400, multi touch works nicely.
Battery life is ~ 3 hrs on the 9 cell.. installing programs and getting things setup the way I like..

DCP latency is good - low .. on battery WIFI enabled.. See attached pic.

 

How does one do that?

Do you just mean create an additional 100 mb partition on the disk and then what install windows on D:?

 

Do I need to turn AHCI on in the bios.

My options are
ATA
AHCI
Raid On

Right now it is set to Raid On?

 

Merlin,

Set to "AHCI" from the 4 options you listed.. that is the wright place.
Don't switch until you are ready to reinstall W7 though - you'll get a blue screen when you try to boot into windows. This is because when windows was being installed it didn't detect any AHCI interfaces and didn't install any drivers.. If you want to switch now .. then google IRRT to AHCI method.

Secondly.. if you were to install W7 fresh (not clone) you would see that when you select the disk you want to install to.. Windows will automatically create a small 100mb partition at Disk 0,0 - then windows will install on the rest of the disk 0,1.

 

I am going to do a fresh install on win 7, looks like with a fresh install windows 7 is smart enough to take care of alignment. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Just need to know what to do with my bios?

 

Thanks Tom, I just set it to AHCI, booting into the windows installation now. I will look for additional partition.

What is "Raid On" anyways? I basically just want to ensure that TRIM works.

 

You'll be fine, windows will take care of it all.

Good luck. Post your WEI when you are finished

 

Some things I am reading seem to indicate that Raid-on vs AHCI is pretty much the same thing except Raid on will give you more flexiblity down the road? Any truth that?

Again, my goal is to enable/support TRIM

One thing I found:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/244645-32-ahci-raid

 

And from intel:

http://www.intel.com/support/chipsets/imst/sb/cs-015988.htm