Acer Timeline Ultra m5?

[vacaloca]

So I left the blue in there but reformated it during my win 7 install, so I cant be completely sure.

However, what I can say is my windows Boot manager still detected a win 7 boot on the blue scorpio (showed two Windows 7s to choose from on boot screen) that I then went in and deleted after my first restart so it seems you would definitely be able to have OSes on both drives.

Hmm, makes me wonder if I can place grub in mSATA MBR and still keep a hibernation (Intel Rapid Start) partition on it for Windoze. I'll have to see if they have the 256GB mSATA drives in stock now. Thanks for the update! But what I wanted to know is solved it seems... if you have a bootable mSATA the BIOS will try to boot from it first, presumably... I believe that's what you mentioned.

[Yanko_mr]

mmm do you think you can fit a regular siza SSD in the msata place? I guy in new egg said you can fit a 2.5, 7mm hard drive.

[vacaloca]

mmm do you think you can fit a regular siza SSD in the msata place? I guy in new egg said you can fit a 2.5, 7mm hard drive.

he means a 2.5" 7mm drive on the normal hard drive bay, msata ssd footprint is much smaller, about the size of a internal wwan card or so. see the pictures that me and the other poster have posted for reference.

In other words, you have 2 slots -- 1 mSATA footprint slot, 1 (slim) footprint 2.5" 7mm slot.

You could
a) leave as is
b) replace mSATA SSD w/ bigger SSD and leave the HDD it comes with
c) replace mSATA SSD w/ bigger SSD and remove HDD it comes with
d) replace mSATA SSD w/ bigger SSD and replace HDD w/ 2.5" 7mm SSD (2 SSDs)
e) not replace mSATA SSD and replace HDD with 2.5" 7mm SSD

plenty of options

So far I've done (e), but tempted to switch for either (c) or (d)

[Yanko_mr]

what about a caddy in the disc bay?

[smerdk]

he means a 2.5" 7mm drive on the normal hard drive bay, msata ssd footprint is much smaller, about the size of a internal wwan card or so. see the pictures that me and the other poster have posted for reference.

In other words, you have 2 slots -- 1 mSATA footprint slot, 1 (slim) footprint 2.5" 7mm slot.

You could
a) leave as is
b) replace mSATA SSD w/ bigger SSD and leave the HDD it comes with
c) replace mSATA SSD w/ bigger SSD and remove HDD it comes with
d) replace mSATA SSD w/ bigger SSD and replace HDD w/ 2.5" 7mm SSD (2 SSDs)
e) not replace mSATA SSD and replace HDD with 2.5" 7mm SSD

plenty of options

So far I've done (e), but tempted to switch for either (c) or (d)

f) remove mSATA SSD and replace HDD with 2.5" 7mm SSD

I've done (f), with a Samsung 830 256gb SSD. It's fast.

I wonder if someone can pull off a raid setup with a mSATA Crucial M4 SSD and a 2.5" M4 SSD...

For the gamers, I've already played Fallout New Vegas with the highest possible settings. Everything plays smoothly.

For some games I've had to change the NVIDIA Control Panel settings. I've set the Global Settings to use the NVIDIA dedicated GPU for stubborn games that wish to use the integrated Intel video.

A question. Will I be able to stick there a Mini PCIe video decoder card like BCM70015 or BCM70012 in the mSATA slot? Sure, right now we might not need them, but maybe in the future this can be used for something similar.

[downloads]

(...)

A question. Will I be able to stick there a Mini PCIe video decoder card like BCM70015 or BCM70012 in the mSATA slot? Sure, right now we might not need them, but maybe in the future this can be used for something similar.

There's no point really. Those decoders are 2010 technology meant mostly for Atom-based devices. Your notebook would easily decode several bluray videos at once without breaking a sweat.

[vacaloca]

I wonder if someone can pull off a raid setup with a mSATA Crucial M4 SSD and a 2.5" M4 SSD...

I have 2x RAID0 Plextor M3s 128GB's in my desktop, and stability is iffy -- I had to get rid of my wireless card that was conflicting with RAID drivers, causing freezes that I couldn't recover from without physically powering off/on the system. That, and I don't believe there is TRIM support for RAID volumes still.

So while this could certainly be possible, I would not do software RAID again. As it is, I bought a SanDisk Extreme SSD 240GB for something like 60ish cents/GB, a few weeks ago, and when I get the time, I am replacing the RAID array with the bigger single drive. The performance should be relatively comparable to the Samsung 830 256GB which I have in my M4-581TG. And yes, the Samsung 830 is crazy fast. Kinda wish I would have bought another when it was at the $200 price point and returned the SanDisk, but no big deal.

My commentary is, well, I just don't see a point to do RAID0 on a portable device like a laptop. Even with my desktop I cannot do any disk operation intensive enough to bottleneck the throughput. Well, I take that back, sort of... if I run Prime95 and run CPU to 100%, the throughput of RAID is diminished about half or more... so if your CPU is doing something extremely intensive, the software RAID might not be worth much. Just my 2 cents.

On a related note, I bought a CT256M4SSD3 just a little while ago, I'm going to put Ubuntu on it and attempt to put the Rapid Start Hibernation partition on it and keep the rest of the drive as spare storage between OS's.

[smerdk]

There's no point really. Those decoders are 2010 technology meant mostly for Atom-based devices. Your notebook would easily decode several bluray videos at once without breaking a sweat.

You are right, but I did not explain myself well.

What I mean is if we could use - in the future - that port for something similar. I read somewhere that this computer does not use the dedicated GPU for the external monitor. Don't know if it's nonsense or not because I haven't tried it yet. I'll give an example of what I was thinking about: maybe we could use the mSATA in a couple of years for a 4K resolution 3d decoder IF such an mSATA 4K 3d decoder existed. Just thinking out loud about possibilities. Apparently, HDMI cables can be used to carry 4K data.

I came to know those 2010 HDTV decoders as they were being put into old, intel video Mac Minis in order to watch HD content.

[willmgordon]

That sounds like a pretty sweet setup, how much benefit do you think youd get with the Rapid start hibernation partition? Currently my boot, sleep, wake, shutdown are pretty quick just from the M4 mSata.

I am thinking about the future when I can grab a 480+ SSD for<.60c/gb for the 7mm slot to replace the scorpio blue what would I do with my mSata heh

[hugebigfatrhino]

I did a fresh Windows 7 reinstall over the weekend and reconfigured the Intel Rapid Start hibernation partition to 10GB to match the installed RAM. There is a video on Youtube that shows how to re-create that partition in case you have deleted it -- much like I did when I installed Windows 7, and recreated it again

Here is that link to the video, it is for an Aspire S3, but the same procedure applies. -- Acer Aspire S3 - How configure 20GB SSD disk for Intel Rapid Start Technology - YouTube

If you do a fresh re-install, you have the option of not installing either the Intel Rapid Start or the Diskeeper Cache. You could probably also use the recovery DVDs and uninstall the software afterwards as well, but I like starting from scratch. I installed Rapid Start because this is what enables some sort of deep sleep mode where supposedly battery savings are greatly enhanced. Note that you might have to install the Rapid Storage drivers before the Rapid Start installer stops complaining that your system isn't supported. (as well as creating the type 84 hibernation partition on the mSATA SSD and rebooting after this is done)

Any thoughts on switching to Intel Rapid Start (IRS) instead of Diskeeper without a re-install from recovery disks? If that's do-able, what about then adding a larger SSD without installing from recovery?