Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

Pretty sure all of the new SSD drives support TRIM, Just check the specs on any one your looking at to confirm.

 

Almost all known vendors of mSATA use TRIM,

Intel, Samsung, Runcore, MyDigitalDiscount, etc.

You shouldn't really worry.

 

I have run my M4600 on a 130w and a 90w. It gets pissy on the 90w but it works fine, I am currently running the 130w on my dock with a single external monitor and it works fine (even with the power profile set to performance).

 

This is a great thread.

I'm going to purchase an M4600 as soon as I figure out a few things. Best hard drive configuration. Is it me or does Dell over charge for the first Hdd (or any other drive for that matter). I was planning on a 256 SSD for boot and The 750Hdd for storage. (450.00 + 340.00) What's the best way to get there? I could get the cheapest Dell config (128 SSD @ 100.00) and upgrade with after market drives. Looking at the numbers I kind of answered my own question. Any thoughts?

Marc

 

Jeffsteez, I think Dell is still using the Samsung PM800 msata drives, but someone who has a recent machine will have to confirm. If you google it, some versions of the firmware for that drive will support TRIM, but only if you are not using the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

You could always do what I did, which is buy a machine from the outlet with a regular hard drive for storing large files, put it in the newmodeus caddy, and then get a regular SSD and use that as the primary drive. The newmodeus caddy for the M4600 is not as good as previous ones I've bought from them - it sticks out just a teensy bit and the color is slightly off, but it works great.

 

Thanks for the info re TRIM. I'm going to be buying from outlet (uk) and getting any sort of info out of them is like getting blood out of a stone - so I'll effectively be buying blind as to the exact model/firmware that the msata drives are shipped with.

I guess I'll just have to hope for the best. Does anyone have a MSATA in their m4600 that DOESN'T support TRIM?

cheers

 

The M4600 can hold one regular 9.5mm laptop drive, and one msata drive.

There is a third (non Dell) option where you can buy a caddy that takes the place of the CD Drive and can use a second 9.5mm laptop drive on the Optical Bay sata port.

what I am not sure about is if the Optical bay is a Sata II or III Port.

I ordred one of the Optical Bay Hard Drive caddies off Ebay @ $ 23.00 shipped

 

Historically the lack of TRIM was in the early Generation SSD drives (pre Windows 7) and most of those were able to be flashed with a new firmware that enabled TRIM.

If your running RAID with SSD the TRIM function does not work yet, supposed to be addressed sometime down the road. But even without TRIM the garbage Collection function more or less provided the same clean up of the SSD's files.

 

guys, what's the latest on the fingerprint reader? my machine seemed to work OK out of the box (although it would be nice if simply putting a finger on the scanner would launch the software to configure and use it, rather than having to go to start/dell/data protection/access...) Geez, I mean at least name it "Fingerprint" something or other...

At any rate, can we use this fingerprint reader to do anything other than login to windows? Can we use it for website passwords? Securing sensitive files/folders? Anything?

thanks

 

is there a way to get some services to load only if I'm in the docking station, or vice versa?

Example: I run input director and ultramon when connected to the docking station, but they are irrelevant (and actually fire warnings) when I'm on the road. I'd like the laptop to skip loading them if we are "free", but load them if we are docked.

Is there a way to do that?