Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

I know this question has been asked before, but so far the only answer was that the SSD card that ships with the M4500 is a Samsung PM800 (which by the way is the common name for all samsung SSD's regardless of form factor) that's 50mm long.

As for buying this card by itself from Dell - after having purchased the laptop - the Dell (France) reps were absolutely unable to give me a proper answer regarding availability. They don't even seem to know that it exists... I would even be ready to get it from Dell US and pay for shipment if I could (can I?) !

I also tried looking for a compatible aftermarket SSD MiniCard online (looking for a mSATA on Mini PCI-E port, 50mm long), but nothing seems available, neither in France nor anywhere else - US included.

Any help would indeed be much appreciated.

Thanks!



Edit: I have contacted a rep from Dell US, who explicitly told me that the MiniCard isn't made available by Dell on its own.

Edit2: i have found a 50mm mini PCI-E 64GB SSD from RunCore, only it is limited to 125Mb/s read and 80Mb/s write... (Full name, on a store's webpage: "64GB Runcore Pro IV Light 50mm mini-SATA PCI-e Solid State Drive SSD")

Edit 3: I actually found someone who sells the original Samsung SSD minicards (item reference MMDPE64GEDXP-MVB). Will let you know about the price as soon as possible, if anyone is interested.

 

I don't, which is why I bought the 64GB minicard and no hard disk. I don't know if there is a standard or not for these minicards.

 

It comes with a metal placeholder which comes out exactly the same way that a hard disk would come out. I imagine that it is there for rigidity. As far as connectors, it's just a drive bay.

 

Hi all,

Again, about the 64GB SSD MiniCard: I found the same exact one for 200$. What I wanted to know is, will I observe a significant performance boost from my original 7200rpm HDD? Significant enough that it would justify paying those 200 bucks?

Thanks!

 

Where did you find one?


.

 

In my experience, yes, but I have not directly compared the two, only indirectly. According to the research I did, you should see at least a consistent 5x speed up from any SSD compared to a hard drive.

I used the SSD for Windows C: and for Linux / and /usr and swap. I put a huge data partition on my 7200 RPM 500 GB plus Linux /home and /var. This laptop boots either OS faster than I have ever experienced before.

 

Thanks a lot ekuns, great advice. You convinced me to pull the trigger on the MiniCard, I just sent my payment =)
To all those who are interested: I found this offer on eBay. The seller is in Poland but ships items worldwide. The offer displays 8 SSD's left, but he could have more in stock, I'm not really sure. Anyways, here's the link:

Samsung MINI SSD mSATA 64GB Mini Pci-Express MINI PCIE - eBay (item 170524279312 end time Aug-17-10 10:33:03 PDT)

I had to contact the seller to ask him if he had anymore of those SSD's before he posted them on eBay. So, if you're reading this after the item end time, you can probably still ask him for one more!

Hope it helps!

 

Thank you.

For those of you who had ordered the 64gb mini SSD in their M4500 from Dell, can you take a look to see if these specs look the same as the one in yours? Thanks.

P/N: MMDPE64GEDXP-MVB (D1)
Model: mSATA 64GB
Firmware: VBM72D1Q



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I've ordered one Precision M4500 with Nvidia 1800M graphics card. What can I expect of it in terms of gaming? Is it based on the Geforce 9 core or GT200?

 

Hi there,

The FX 1800M is based on a Geforce GT 335M chip, with slightly higher clock speeds. However, because it's optimized for CAD and other professional applications, you'll probably notice it's about 10~20% (it's just to give you an idea, I didn't run any extensive benchmarks on my system) less powerful than the original gaming chip.
I know that the M4500 can handle GTA IV with ease, for example. I guess that's a pretty good indicator. Based on the benchmark results available online, you'll also be able to play Crysis and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 with decent settings.

To get into more detail:

GT 335M: Notebookcheck: NVIDIA GeForce GT 335M
FX 1800M: Notebookcheck: NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M