Upgrades for new M6700 - specifically optical hard drive-advice?

My 6700 turned up yesterday, 5pm. So pleased with the screen quality and speed.

I've niggles with hibernation/sleep sadly but that's windows 7.

As I'm running raid 0, I'm considering a fat spinner for the optical bay and unsure what the options are. Do I need an extra bracket or anything or a specific drive model?

The other option is host powered USB external, but I do like the idea that I can fire off an image backup wherever I am. I'm concerned that raid 0 ssd's may be medium risk for failing over the course of 3 years

Final question, I've 32gb 1600mhz ram. Is the upgrade to 1866mhz worth it, day to day? I'm not gaming, just developing and browsing.

Thanks for any assistance offered!

 

You can get any standard 9.5mm optical drive bay caddy. You'll have to be careful, since hard drives are also 9.5mm tall, some caddies don't have clearance to hold a whole 9.5mm drive but rather only 7mm (slightly smaller form factor that some SSDs use) --- so make sure you get one that says it will take a 9.5mm drive. Of course, if you get any random caddy it will probably not match your computer (in terms of color). Dell has an official part that does match, I'm sure somewhere someone has posted the part number...

As for 1600MHz to 1866MHz, if you already have the 32GB of RAM, I'd say the upgrade will be incremental at best and is probably not worth it unless you have money to burn.

 

Unless you are using the memory in a very dynamic fashion, then an incremental upgrade might save you time, but for most workloads, you won't see a really noticeable increase.

 

So a benchmark only upgrade then. I wasn't sure.

As for the disk, I'll be needing 7mm high ones then I'm guessing. Thank you.

 

If you mean for the Dell optical bay HDD caddy, I think so, the two main bays take a 9.5mm drive just fine they won't take 12mm drives though. There might be some 9.5mm aftermarket caddies that will take 9.5mm drives, it will be a tight fit though.

 

Well i'm having the devil's own time tracking the optical bay caddy from Dell, even the online chat support guy says I'll have to talk to support about it. Sheesh.

 

I'm pretty sure someone on NBR knows the part number, I think it was posted somewhere in one of the two owner's thread, but it won't be easy to find. If you have the part number it will make your search easier.