dvanwag

Does anyone know why a new Sager box would take forever to shutdown? I have my Win 8.1 on a Samsung 840 Evo and my rig has been taking about 5 minutes to shut off when I power down.

I know it's not a show stopper but it is bloody annoying. Can anyone please advise?

Hi Prema,

Thanks for the excellent work you do with BIOSs. I used your BIOS mod to flash my P157SM-A and its been great. My only question is I set both the User and the HDD Passwords and now have to enter my SSD's password upon boot. I have also noticed that when I go back into the BIOS itself the HDD Password is not showing as being enabled and active. Can you confirm whether or not the HDD password is running and am I supposed to "login" to my 840 Evo every time upon boot?

I second the drill - you have to be VERY careful but it does work. Another method I've heard of but never tried involved using a putty or cement (I forget what it's called) that you let dry around a screw driver head. Maybe someone else has tried a similar method?

Sager NP8258-S (Clevo P157SM-A), i74900, 32 GB RAM, four 1TB 840 EVO's (two mSATA), Nvidia 880. Thing is a beast!

Just to be sure is your power box a P157SM or a P157SM-A?

Agree with Suryopras - Prema's mods give you a host of options to tweak the BIOS any way you want, especially when it comes to power and fan control. It's safe and dummy proof - just follow the instructions.

I can't speak for the Seagate drives as the ones I have are the large capacity types with their own power adapters but the WD 2TB Passports are okay performance wise. What I like most about them is that they are pretty durable. I travel a lot for work and always throw one in my Go Bag, and being bounced around quite a bit I've never had a problem with the mechanical hardware.

Like many have already said here - using RAID is a major pain. One thing you may want to consider is using Software RAID (please, don't throw anything at me!) instead. I have a Sager NP 8258 and have two 840 EVOs and two 840 mSATAs, all 1TB, and have used both the striped dynamic disk and Storage Spaces to create a software RAID 0 without any problems. I noticed increased read and write speeds and as far as I was able to tell via the command prompt TRIM was still enabled. Ironically enough when combining the SSDs through Samsung Magician the program actually recognized the drives as if they were in a true Hardware (i.e. BIOS) RAID configuration.