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

I did want to try it in the second by but I don't have the caddy for it. I'll keep the formatting of the drive in mind though.

 

Hmm, do you have an enclosure you could try the drive with?

 

The solution to this problem was a 9.5mm Adapter / Spacer by the way as detailed here: Replacing or Adding Samsung SSD 840 EVO BIOS not detecting drive in primary bay Precision M4700 Laptop - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

I purchased one from Other World Computing: OWC SSD95MMSPCR 7mm to 9.5mm Adapter / Spacer for... in stock at OWC

 

Hi Everyone

I wanted to improve the performance of my Dell M6500 precision laptop. First I removed the two 2Gb Samsung memory stick that I replaced with four 8 Gb Kensington (Kingston 8GB 1333MHz module Dell A4105740 A5039653). Then I wanted to change the system HDD disk C: for a SSD but since I could not find a clear explanation to do so I decided to let you benefit from my experience.

I bought a Samsung SSD 840 EVO 1To together with the ICY BOX IB-AC622-U3 since there is no USB adapter in the SSD box; it is a lot easier to plug a USB that to open the belly of your computer to take out a disk then put you SSD....

I followed exactly the Samsung protocol: run the clonix data migration software and the cloning was done in about 3 hours for my 156Go of system and softwares.

Note that my C: disk was set on RAID and the transfer work with the RAID configuration. First, technical issue: When I inserted the SSD in the slot I realized that the SSD is thinner by 6.57mm vs. the HDD and that is a lot!! And even well pushed in the connection is not tight enough and the disk is not recognized...

Fortunately, I work in a CNRS research lab and we have a great machine shop people and facility and they were able to give me in 30 min a plexiglass spacer of the exact same height and width with the exact thickness of 6.57mm. I made lot of 1cm holes in the plexiglass to allow for air circulation. The disk was now connected and recognized all right but was still set in RAID mode.

As you may have already noticed I am not a specialist, by far a geek. My knowledge is just what I read from forums. Since I benefited from them and I did not find a full explanation of what I did I wrote this one!!!

Now the fun part... In order to benefit from the maximum speed the SSD disk can give you have to set the disk to AHCI. Anyway the magician software that comes with the disk suggests you to do so.

Note that it was always possible to set the bios parameter to RAID or AHCI back and forth without any trouble... exept that without the proper modification (see below) the AHCI mode leave your computer in a state of recurrent boot failure that you have to stop manually.

Lot of forum said that the only way to switch from RAID to AHCI is to reinstall windows...A couple of forum said that with a simple change in the registry it works...

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...-to-ahci/4c94f678-6bd1-48a6-b871-8872c841023a

Well, not for me, my disk did not boot after the above recommended changes in the registry.

Then I found a Dell forum.

http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/SLN285045/EN

To modify the registry the site refers to a text file that do not exist (anymore ?)... Since I did not find this gost “ataahci.txt” file and I do not know how to modify the registry in bloc (?). As the site gives you the text of the file I modified the registry exactly as indicated line by line...

Some of the lines of the registry are to be modified, some are to be created. I did it without understanding what I was doing but I thoroughly check for mistyping...

At the end of the process I quit the registry editor, reboot my computer enter the BIOS and switch for the last time to AHCI. Yes for the last time, because it worked !!!

The computer rebooted twice I guess but now everything is fine I run in AHCI for real! I checked for windows index of performances of my system and I jumped already from 5.2 to 6.2. Then I run magician and I was happy to see that AHCI was really on!!! Then I went thru the option of magician and found a “rapid mode” and activated it. After update the windows index my system reached 6.9.

I hope this will help you

Cheers

Jean-Michel Hermel

Composant Détails Sous-indice Indice de base

Processeur Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz 6,9

6,9

Déterminé par le

sous-indice le plus

bas

Mémoire vive 32,0 Go 7,4

Graphiques ATI FirePro M7740 7,1

Graphiques de jeu 4091 Mo total de mémoire vidéo disponible 7,1

Disque dur principal 774GB libre (932GB au total) 7,7

Windows 7 Professionnel

Système

Fabricant Dell Inc.

Modèle Precision M6500

Quantité totale de mémoire système Mémoire vive 32,0 Go

Type du système Système d’exploitation 64 bits

Nombre de coeurs de processeur 4

Stockage

Taille totale des disques durs 1630 Go

Partition de disque (C 774 Go libre (932 Go au total)

Partition de disque (D 231 Go libre (699 Go au total)

Lecteur multimédia (E CD/DVD

Carte graphique

Afficher le type de carte ATI FirePro M7740

Mémoire graphique totale disponible 4091 Mo

Mémoire graphique dédiée 1024 Mo

Mémoire système dédiée 0 Mo

Mémoire système partagée 3067 Mo

Afficher la version du pilote de la carte 8.702.0.0

Résolution du moniteur principal 1920x1200

Résolution du moniteur secondaire 1280x1024

Version DirectX DirectX 10

Réseau

Carte réseau Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet

Carte réseau Dell Wireless 1510 Wireless-N WLAN Mini-Card

Carte réseau Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter

Remarques

 

That is a nice solution Hermel. I remember back in 2010 when I first got our m6500 I had to reinstall windows to switch from RAID to AHCI, because the registry changes I tried didn't work either. Nice to know that you found the solution for the registry "hack". Congrats on finding that tidbit of info and for sharing it.

And also of course happy that the OP found their solution via the 7-9.5mm adapter (resolved last year?). Although the OP was different issue than your's, still it is nice to see your solution to the RAID to AHCI issue.