Solid State Drives (SSDs) compatible with the Dell Precision M6500

Hi Everyone,

I purchased a Dell Precision M6500 earlier this week which came with one 7200 RPM Toshiba hard drive. I purchased a Samsung Electronics 840 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Single Unit Version Internal Solid State Drive MZ-7TE250BW (SSD) to replace it.

I tried installing the new drive and while in Raid mode (the default) it said that no hard disk was in either Bay 1 or Bay 2. I then tried switching to AHCI but I got the white cursor in the top left of a black screen regardless of what I did (like pressing F2 to try to get to the bios or F12 to try and get to the bootable menu).

I then put back in the 320GB 7200RPM HDD that the machine came with, reset the bios settings/switched back to Raid from AHCI and everything is back to normal (normal booting sequence and Windows 7 running).

Does this have to do with mSATA vs SATA III vs SATA II or 6Gbps vs 3Gbps or something like that?

Thanks,

Andy

 

Did you image your old drive onto the SSD or were you booting from a windows install disc?


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

- I was trying to boot from the Windows 7 USB Flash Drive that came with the system

 

I would re-download the .iso for the version of Windows 7 you want and make a new install flash drive. It is possible that your installed has a slightly corrupted file.

Also, check into the BIOS settings to make sure that boot from USB is enabled, some systems require that to be enabled and the default is set to off.

 

Well the Windows 7 flash drive works perfectly, I re-installed Windows 7 on the 7200 RPM Toshiba hard drive that came with the system. But at the same point each time with the Samsung EVO SSD it says that no hard disk is detected and that the installation cannot continue. The BIOS cannot detect the Samsung EVO solid state drive, but it can detect the 7200 RPM Toshiba hard drive.

 

This one is odd... I had no issues w/ either ssd (see Sig) on my m4500, and I think the 4500 and 6500 run the same chipset

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

If you have another computer, try the Evo in there, it might just be that your drive is DoA.

If it works in another computer, format it and try reinstalling on the formated drive.

 

Andy -

I wanted to share with you that I am using a Dell M6500 with (2) Samsung EVO 1TB SSD drives in the primary/secondary bay as RAID0 and it works fine so your system should be compatible as well.

 

Wow, I guess it may be that the drive is DOA. I don't have another PC that I can test it out on though. I'll go ahead and return or exchange it (the Samsung SSD). Thanks!

 

doesn't your M6500 have two drive bays though? You could always put the drive in the second bay and see if it is recognized by the disk management utility. Maybe you'd be able to format it from there. I've had it happen to me once that Windows wouldn't install on a SSD until I had formatted for some reason.

If you can format the drive through Windows with the SSD in the second drive bay, I would run diagnostics on it before using it and I'd hold on to the previous drive until you're sure that everything is working as intended with the SSD, just in case.