Precision m4800 - Additional Hard Drives

It's a shame nothing ever came of the announcement someone (Seagate?) made a few years ago that they were going to make a line of thin, slow, large-capacity 3.5" laptop drives (basically, sticking desktop platters into laptop drive designs, because the extra inch gives them almost double the platter capacity at almost zero extra cost). I remember that their theory was that modern laptops are thin, but have bigger footprints than ever, and now that we have big mSATA SSDs, we need traditional drives with bulk capacity more than we need traditional drives with 7200RPM+ performance. If drives like that existed in 9.5mm height, optical bay drives would be the PERFECT application for them.

 

What is the interface of the media bay? mSATA or usb3?
Can you check this in the device manager?

 

The optical drive bay has standard SATA.

 

Thanks. I am planing to replace the optical drive with a hard disk.
Glad to hear that it has SATA such that it won't have performance impact from the interface.

 

Hello everybody, I'm about to purchase a m4800 with wwan card. I wonder if I can add an internal small SSD drive by means of the half-size mini-pcie slot that appears to be available.

The Notebookreview analysis Review Dell Precision M4800 Notebook - NotebookCheck.net Reviews clearly shows an unused half-size mini-pcieslot next to the WiFi module; however, the m4800 user manual (ftp from dell.com) does not mention the option of adding an SSD there.

Has anyone tested this configuration? Thanks in advance:hi2:

Francesco

 

I'm not 100% sure, but I think you need to choose either WWAN or MSATA - I believe they use the same slot.

 

Correct, you can only add an mSATA card to the full-size slot. You have to choose whether to use it for WWAN or mSATA in that slot. Alternatively, you can see if you could find a half-size WWAN card, that should work in a regular mPCIe slot, though I'm not sure how many are available.

 

Ok! WWAN half-size cards are uncommon, but I can find one. The real problem is how to extend the WWAN antenna plugs to reach the half-size slot: they might be not long enough! Would any lucky owner of a m4800 kindly have a look inside its laptop to assess if the plugs can reach the half-size slot?

(moreover, I might have to dremel a track to route the plugs properly to the slot..)

Thanks in advance!

F.

 

Ah ha ha, good point, didn't think of that. On the M6700 the slots are all right next to each other so this isn't a big issue, however, there isn't much extra cord if you needed to move them somewhere else. If you download the manual for the M4800 from support.dell.com you can probably find some photos of the inside.

 

Photos are available, but they are not so useful in order to understand whether antenna leads are able to reach the half size mPCIE slot.

Anyway.. I have ordered a (very basic: i7 4800, 8gb RAM, 500gb HD, internal HDSPA module) m4800. Unfortunately it will be shipped in febuary - some delay. When it arrives, I will check how to manage to add a second, faster hdd (or simply replace the ugly 5400(!!) rpm one) and how to add some RAM...

See you in a few weeks on the m4800 owners thread