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M14x R2 - Secondary HDD to compliment my Crucial m4 mSATA SSD


kaldon

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I got my M14x R2 on Tuesday with the standard 500GB 7200RPM HDD, I'm trying to decide if I should go with any of the standard 750GB 7200RPM 2.5" drives, or if I should consider the 750GB Seagate Momentus XT considering its not going to be used as a boot drive. I bought and used the 500GB Seagate Momentus XT pretty much the day it came out for my M11x R1 and I never for a second regretted the decision, it was fantastic, I'm just not sure its necessarily worth the price difference to use the 750GB XT as a Game/Storage/Media drive. I would appreciate any considerations anyone might provide as to the advantages/disadvantages of choosing one way or the other.

In High Regard,

Kaldon

Alienware M14x R2 - i7-3720QM/8GB Kingston HyperX PNP 1866Mhz/Crucial m4 mSATA SSD/Seagate 500GB 7200RPM HDD/GeForce GT 650M 1GB/900p HD+ Display/Sony BD-5850H Blu-Ray Writer/Killer 1202N

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  • 4 months later...

i've just replaced my mSATA with a 256gb Crucial M4 and my main HD with a 512GB Samsung 840 pro, worked out a LOT cheaper than having the SSD factory installed in my m14x

Initially i used the mSATA for the OS and a 500gb standard HD for storage, but crystal benchmarks showed that the mSATA read/write wasn't as high as the SATA SSD.

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  • 2 weeks later...
i've just replaced my mSATA with a 256gb Crucial M4 and my main HD with a 512GB Samsung 840 pro, worked out a LOT cheaper than having the SSD factory installed in my m14x

Initially i used the mSATA for the OS and a 500gb standard HD for storage, but crystal benchmarks showed that the mSATA read/write wasn't as high as the SATA SSD.

Thats usually the case since the msata interface doesn't have the bandwidth that Sata does. Nice job getting the ssds third party and saving.

GS3 L710 4.2.1 AOSP Kt747 2.1Ghz ROW/Ktoonservative *Tapatalk

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  • 2 weeks later...

Actually both the mSATA port and the primary HDD port in the m14x R2 are SATA 6Gb/s, the ODD bay is only SATA 3Gb/s.

The only reason mSATA SSDs tend to be slower is that they generally use fewer NAND channels and quite a few of them are only 3Gb/s controllers. There just isn't enough room for 8 NAND packages on an mSATA card!

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If you buy a mSATA SSD consider buying a Sandforce model, because they're limited to only 4 channels the compression really helps performance. I did a lot of research into this because I bought my ADATA SX300. It's still not as fast as a 2.5" SSD but it's pretty much as good as you can get in an mSATA drive.

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[deleted]

Ah, NVM. I see that you already have the SSD on the mSATA port. If it is already configured as cache then that's going to offer your best overall performance. Large data reads like game loads bypass cache so you won't see any benefit swapping the 500G disk for the Momentus XT. I have a Momentus XT in another notebook and I've resisted swapping it specifically because the gain isn't there and I don't need the extra capacity that much.

If the mSATA SSD is 60G or bigger then you could configure it as a system drive. Windows 7 fits quite comfortably on a 60G volume. You could then swap in the Momentus XT as a data drive. This is something I've considered but the cost of the mSATA cards is still higher than I want to pay for the capacity.

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