Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

As stated above, the SSD miniPCIe card fits into the same slot as the WWAN card, hence you can only have one or the other. Expresscard SSDs are a totally different thing.

 

I am largely unimpressed with the NewmodeUS HDD caddy. It doesn't fit flush, is black, instead of the dark silver of the M4600, the HDD makes a distinctly different vibration sound when I place my left hand down to type, and it just feels cheap.

I don't mind the black so much, but the way it fits is just awful.

Anyone have any alternatives?

 

thank god for this review if not i would have overspent 40 bucks on cheap china oem. newmodeus rep should come out and explain the mark up.

 

Also, the screws don't even fit right when screwing the HDD in. I am only able to screw 1 in correctly, the others stick out just enough that they get caught when sliding it in and out. This could be isolated to my particular drive, but it is the drive that it shipped with from Dell. I moved an SSD to the normal HDD bay.

It's almost like the drive needs to slide like 1/16" more to make them line up better but no amount of force seems to achieve this. It also appears like getting it out, ever, is going to be a chore, but that's okay. I'd rather that, then it be sliding around. However, if it was indeed, slightly larger, it'd be easier to get the screws in and snug, and then it wouldn't slide around...

 

very interesting - I did not realize the WWAN slot could be used for anything other than the WWAN card, nor did the Dell representative when I spoke with them regarding putting an SSD into the M4600 along with a regular hard drive. I was explicitly told that the only way to have two drives on the machine is to put a regular hard drive inside the machine and utilize the 54mm expess card slot for the SSD.

Unfortunately I absolutely must have the 54mm express card slot for a Quatech parallel port replicator, as a result I skipped the SSD drive and instead purchased 16GB of RAM. Oddly enough Dell wanted $800 to install the RAM, and instead I purchase the RAM from Dell (as an upgrade memory module) for $440... go figure.

Machine should be here (California) on Monday.

Given that I did not have a WWAN card installed in the machine, I will explore further and determine what/which SSD card will fit. That would be very nice.

 

Where are you located?

You can probably get 16GB of DDR3 RAM for an M4600 for ~ $150 if you really tried in the US at places like Newegg.

Newegg.com - Laptop Memory, 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM, 8GB (2 x 4GB), DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)

Just buy 2 of any of those. Maybe you can cancel your upgrade?

 

I just ordered my M4600 can't wait until it is delivered

 

You can get it for about $50 less than that. I paid $95 for 16 gigs for mine Ram is at a all time low so why not max it out now

 

Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm in Berkeley, California. I did quite a bit of investigating regarding RAM for the M4600, and I could have purchased less expensive RAM. I also checked with our hardware guys at work (this machine is for my personal home use) and they strongly suggested going with Dell-certified memory for the machine - and that's the route I took.

The Dell-certified memory is about double the price of off-the-street memory, and while I do not know what (if anything) is done to establish that a particular memory stick is better or worse than another, I do know that in the hard drive world it is common to cherry-pick the best quality drives from a particular build run; I'm expecting that is what Dell is doing with the 'certified' memory (or else I'm wasting my money!).

What I actually have in hand are 4 x 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM Dell-certified sticks for the M4600 (the sticks have already by post), and the machine is being delivered next week with 2GB ram installed (minimum Dell will install). I will pull out the 2GB and install the 4x4GB myself when the machine gets here.

 

Since the newmodeus caddy is a bust, does anyone know of a better alternative? I would like to eventually stick the ODD in an external enclosure and put a SSD in the bay.