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    Can someone tell me what goes in this empty spot?

    Discussion in '2015+ Alienware 13 / 15 / 17' started by jtravapd8578, Jun 25, 2018.

  1. jtravapd8578

    jtravapd8578 Notebook Consultant

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    4CD00E56-D240-40FB-9D3E-B89E3E5B69BB.jpeg its listed in my bios as having 3 m.2 openings. One is being filled by a 512GB m.2. I was gonna pick up a Samsung 1TB drive for the second m.2 opening. But the first SSD-1 spot as shown in this photo is half the size of the m.2 drives. It’s almost the size of a msata drive but my msata drive I have doesn’t fit it’s to thick. One person said it’s for WiFi/wlan, And it is very similar to that size but in the photo the WiFi chip is installed just above the large empty m.2 slot next to where it says wlan. It’s just covered by that cheap paper covering. Do they make m.2 drives that are are half the length of the others? Is that a spot for the intel optane drives? (Which I don’t understand at all but my computer supports) any help would be great .
     
  2. Reciever

    Reciever D! For Dragon!

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    Yep!

    They make I want to say 3 different types of m.2 drives and SSD-1 looks like it may just be a SATA m.2 slot instead of SSD-2 being PCIE based but Im just making the assumption based on marking one slot with nothing on the other.
     
  3. Onetwo345

    Onetwo345 Notebook Geek

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    rinneh likes this.
  4. jtravapd8578

    jtravapd8578 Notebook Consultant

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    Thanks guys . Yeah before I sold my Alienware 18 I tried to see if the Samsung msata drive would fit there and it didn’t so I figured there had to be another type of m.2. Currently I have the 512Gb m.2 that comes with the 15r4 , I have my Samsung 840 pro SSD in the one 2.5 inch slot and tomorrow I have a Samsung 1 TB pro 970 m.2. Now I keep reading that the m.2 drives overheat peoples systems. So far with just the one it hasn’t been a issue . I let you know what happens when I add the Samsung pro 970. I think I’ll jsut leave that small spot open . 2 TB is fine enough space for me , plus I have a usb 3.0 4 TB tiny passport drive that I have run games off of directly and honestly haven’t really noticed any type of FPS drops or extensive loading times in between levels etc.
    thanks for everyone’s help.
     
  5. Azther

    Azther Notebook Consultant

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    its actually a 2260 ssd iirc, i have an Apacer 240gb in mine