**GUIDE** Installing secondary hard drive on your M14x w/pics !!

[mw86]

What that sucks... so not all 2 1/2 inch mobile hard drives will work? That bites!

[svl7]

the max a 9.5mm caddy can support is the 500GB, for a 750 GB or a 1TB you would need the 12.5 mm caddy , which is already to big for the M14x

http://forum.techinferno.com/storage/725-samsung-introduces-1tb-spinpoint-m8-mobile-drive-%2A%2A9-5mm%2A%2A.html#post8103

Incredible how fast technology changes

[Jimbo]

@svl7 Thanks, I knew I'd seen it discussed somewhere.....

[Alex Six]

for this caddy, would there be a huge, or even a noticeable difference between a 5600rpm and a 7200 rpm drive? also what is the impact on battery life?

[Stevenxowens792]

@Alex - There is a difference between 7200 and 5400 rpm drives. Throughput is something like 80-110 for the 7200 and 60-80 for the 5400. Battery life is always going to decrease with any extra hardware that's added and utilized.

Think of it this way. If your notebook has an absolute max battery life with nothing enabled except the LCD at lowest level of 7 hours. Anything you enable takes away from it. So, enable wifi and now you have 6.5 hours. Enable sound and now you have 6.0 hours. Enable 3 settings brighter in LCD and now you have 4.5 hours. Run a DVDrom off the optical port and now you have 3.0 hours of estimated battery life. ...etc... etc.. etc...

I dont think anyone has done a complete (what if) scenario for the m14x for battery. It just takes too much time and of course you don't get to fully utilize your notebook while running the tests. For performance with max battery savings it's recommended to use SSD.

Best Wishes,

StevenX

[Guest camel]

hi nice guilde :-) .

sorry if i make mistake but english is not my main language .

i have just bought a m14x and i would like to add to it my ssd intel 320 of 120gb .

i intend to install on it an operating system like linux ..... (against the chart to say which one )

do you guys please know if there's any hdd bay that would be able to make my ssd ride fast and beeing able to have an other operating system runing on it? i mean sata 2 , because i have been looking around and it seems like the optical port works only on sata 1 , does anybody pls succesfully made it works sata2 ? and beeing able to have an other operating system runing on it?

Edited October 12, 2011 by camel

[mw86]

An OS is very feasible on it but as far as I know its always going to operate at Sata 1...

[moriarty]

Nice! I also did this and it is really cool!

[ebondefender]

I may try this later on after my R2's warranty expires. My hard drive is down to a meager 250GB left...darn you Steam sales!

[ozdude]

This looks like a super cool mod. Could the key people who like to run dual OSes like myself would love. Think I'll be investing one and fitting an ssd!

[Agustin]

So I see that installing an SSD in the caddy was discussed but did anyone give it a try. For awhile I had a 240GB SSD as my primary drive and a 500GB harddrive in the caddy. I must note that I used a Seagate drive that had jumpers to get past the issue with the drive going to sleep during extended data transfers. The first drive I tried in the caddy was a Wester Digital Blue? but that one would go to sleep after awhile and thats when I read about using the Seagates. In any case, I purchased a much larger SSD drive not that prices are dropping and would like to stick my 240 GB in the caddy. I know that speeds are limited to SATA I speeds but for those that did this, did your SSD "go to sleep" during extended data transfers?

[nicovlogg]

Thanks for the great guide! Am I correct in assuming that the secondary hard drive is not fastened at the back at all with any of the optical drive screws?

[mw86]

So I see that installing an SSD in the caddy was discussed but did anyone give it a try. For awhile I had a 240GB SSD as my primary drive and a 500GB harddrive in the caddy. I must note that I used a Seagate drive that had jumpers to get past the issue with the drive going to sleep during extended data transfers. The first drive I tried in the caddy was a Wester Digital Blue? but that one would go to sleep after awhile and thats when I read about using the Seagates. In any case, I purchased a much larger SSD drive not that prices are dropping and would like to stick my 240 GB in the caddy. I know that speeds are limited to SATA I speeds but for those that did this, did your SSD "go to sleep" during extended data transfers?

That is a good question and i hope someone with this setup can answer that. Some of the bios may have an hd option or rather unlocked bios may have setting pertaining to power savings on various ports ie sata, pci etc

[Raven.ar]

Great guide for the hddbay. I have tried this and it is great. Speed of my hdd is Sata 2.

Thanx

[corp769]

Did this mod for a buddy of mine a while back..... I see other people are doing this as well, awesome! I didn't even bother to search and see if someone did this at the time, but I winged it in less than 10 minutes with this mod. Quick and simple

[liquified]

this is awesome, but does anyone have an alternative site/place to buy the optical bay caddy because the ebay one seems to take soo long, from what i hear, the minimum time for delivery would be 10days

[Duna Unha]

I got mine from ebay....

There are some other websites that sell these, buy the price is much higher...

I'm using OCZ Agility 3 with the lastes firmware update, runs sata 3 fine on Bios A05 or lower. No BSOD at all.

[Jalawi Bin Saud]

thanks that was helpful i have one Q

i have AW M14x R2 and i have 64GB SSD from the moment i bought it if i want to upgrade the SSD to 128GB or 256GB

what should i do ?

[xfw55]

I wonder.... if A08 bios SATA problem can be fixed, how about instead of using 1.5gb/s on 2nd HDD can we make it happen 3.0gb/s?

[ratinox]

You'll rarely see the full 3gb/s in normal use and then only from the fastest (read: most expensive) SSDs. You definitely won't get that from the Agility 3 outside of benchmarks. The real performance killer is mechanical latency. Swap in a SSD and latency mostly goes away. In practice it won't matter much which SATA port you use unless you go with the high-end Crucial models that will use the full 3gb/s bandwidth.

[sleepyedward]

The bad thing about this is, the secondary HDD suffers from not enough current i guess?

I can use it for a while but every now and then, like 10 mins it cannot be detected.

Any idea guys?

[P-Chan]

I installed an SSD as my secondary drive shortly after getting my m14x, but I kept getting BSODs so I moved the SSD to the main drive and made my regular drive external. This seemed to have helped, but now I'm having issues again so I'm going to try the A08 w/ SATA fix BIOS (once I have the ability to download things).

[Darkxtrem]

Hello,

I followed the tutorial (very great, thank you !) and installed my second hard disk sucessfully. However, recently I noticed than really often my second hard drive (the original one) "disapear' during usage of the computer and so I do have to restart the system and It will show up again. I do think I installed it correctly otherwise it wouldnt show up at all right ? Thank you ifyou have any advices....

[citrix]

is there anyone post screencapture using sata3 ssd on alienware m14x r1? after A08 w/ SATA fix BIOS flashed

consider to purchase ssd ocz vertex 4 128gb sata3...to alienware m14x r1

[Smokemr]

Would be nice if the OP had some notes on the BIOS variances. I did this mod and have been working on getting the second drive to perform right. I hope the modded A08 in the other threads fixes it.