Precision m4600 and mSata. Need postive users please.

Anyone out there using mSata and a large cyclical drive and NOT have problems? Reason I ask is I have only seen people post issues with said setup. Im a little bit out from doing this or getting a large sata 6.0gb drive, but might as well start asking now. Thanks yall!

 

I'm ont of those that has posted some issues but overall have things running well (although I have two SSDs - the Dell/Samsung 256 in the main HDD slot (SATA - 6 gbs/sec) and a Runcore T50 128 in the mSATA slot (OS drive). This may or may not be applicable to your proposed setup. Notes and issues:
1. The mSATA slot is SATA 2 only (3 gbs/sec) so you will not the best performance (still much better than a regular HDD). I really wasted some money getting the T50 SATA 3 although I can migrate it elsewhere in the future I guess.
2. I was having occasional lock ups for 1-2 minutes with HDD light solid and laptop mostly unresponsive. Then suddenly everything would come back. Some research indicated that it might be due to power management so, based on info found and this site Solution: C300 Disk Freeze-ups in Windows 7 solved... - Crucial Community I made changes and have so far gone a couple of weeks without any lock up. I cannot say whether the mSata or the SDD was the issue.
3. About once every 15 or so boots the bios does not seem to find the mSATA (my boot drive) and I need to restart. In fact, I have not seen this for a while now.

I have a docking station at home and have a 3TB external 7200 rpm drive connected through the eSATA port. This provides excellent storage and performance for anything that needs lots of space. Rather dumb that the docking station does not have USB3 ports! I also use an external 2.5 inch HDD with a USB3 cable. This drive is fully encrypted (TrueCrypt) and still the performance is amazing given it is a standard 7200 rpm encrypted drive.

 

Im mainly just looking for good things to be said about msata. I want to go this route for speed and the ability to load the secondary HDD with tons of movies and data that I need on the go. As far as speed is concerned a sata2 msata should still run circles around a sata 3 cyclical hdd, so its really the reliability I am worried about since this laptop is my meal ticket that I rely on 24/7 365. SO I need it to be 100% there for me.

 

I have a 480 GB primary SSD drive, and a 120 GB msata drive, and a 750 GB standard hard drive (in place of the optical drive) and have had no issues at all.

 

The msata drive is running at 3GB/sec speed, it is a non brand name i picked up on Ebay for $ 180.00

 

Good to hear!

 

My machine was shipped with the 120gb msata that I use as a primary drive and the 750gb standard HD that I use for data.

I have webcam problems and an occassional sound buzz - but I think that is sound card related. As far as I'm aware, the hard disks work great.

 

I have no problems, but my platter HDD is on the USB 3.0.

 

Installation was easy and if you're planning to do a fresh install of your OS of choice it's really easy.
However, if you want to clone your partition onto the Msata SSD you might run into some quirks.
The problem I had (or still have) is that my stock Dell Win7 Pro install won't properly recognize the msata SSD (that is a Samsung PM810). However the fresh install of Win7 Ultimate worked without a flaw and recognized the Msata SSD right away

 

Can anyone suggest the mSata's brand/model that you had used and reviewed as reliable and compatible with M4600?