E6520 Owner's Thread

[veritas72]

Originally Posted by ranranran

...and that leaves us in the exact same situation..... someone will have to take the plunge. Anyone live near a Fry's where they can pick one up, try it, and return it if it doesn't work?

i'll do it myself as soon as my machine actually arrives (unless we know by then)

[ranranran]

Originally Posted by veritas72

i'll do it myself as soon as my machine actually arrives (unless we know by then)

we await with baited breath......

[erblemoof]

I just did a little research, and learned that the latest and second-latest generation of Dell Precision notebooks (m4600, m6500, etc.) all in fact have mSATA-compatible PCIe slots. If Dell carries over technology between lines (lots of manufacturers do, to save costs) it's totally possible the E6520 is mSATA-compatible. I tried to find information, from Dell, stating that the Precision notebooks had mSATA slots. I couldn't find anything. I did, however, find SSDs sold online by MyDigitalDiscount whose specs stated both (A) that they were mSATA-compatible drives, and (B) that they would work in Dell Precision and Lenovo notebooks. I have seen literature from Lenovo touting mSATA compatibility. I'm not sure why Dell has to be so mysterious about it. The only thing I can think of is if they keep the waters murky, perhaps that will lure customers to buy SSDs from them instead of another vendor.

In any event, because I'm so flush with cash (sarcasm; I really just want to get this to work) I gave some love to my credit card company and purchased a 64GB mSATA drive from MDD. It should be here by Wednesday of next week.

[CiP]

Originally Posted by ranranran

...on a separate note, what are people's opinions of the maximum volume for the E6520.

When I first started using it (a couple of days) I thought it was plenty loud, but lately it seems to not be loud enough, even at max volume. Just curious if something happened, or its just me..... (Spring = pollen = allergies = congestion = me)

Same here. It just seems like the speakers can handle much more volume. Much to low for me. Even my Latitude E6510 was louder. Hopefully DELL will release an IDT driver update to fix this issue soon.

Glad you are not the only one that noticed this.

[jcthorne]

If indeed the E6x20s support mSATA drives, would really like to see a performace evaluation between one and a top line SATA drive like the Intel 510 series. I'd rather have the drive slot available for storage and boot from an mSATA drive but not at the expense of real world performance.

[erblemoof]

Originally Posted by jcthorne

If indeed the E6x20s support mSATA drives, would really like to see a performace evaluation between one and a top line SATA drive like the Intel 510 series. I'd rather have the drive slot available for storage and boot from an mSATA drive but not at the expense of real world performance.

The SATA III spec is 6Gbps, mini-PCIe Gen 2 is 5Gbps, and mSATA is either 1.5 or 3Gbps (the equivalent of SATA I or SATA II). Personally, having used SATA II SSDs for a few years, 3Gbps is plenty fast enough for me. Wanting to run VMs on the drives in the SATA III bays, I could still make use of the SATA III... If I were to upgrade those drives.

[ranranran]

Originally Posted by erblemoof

The SATA III spec is 6Gbps, mini-PCIe Gen 2 is 5Gbps, and mSATA is either 1.5 or 3Gbps (the equivalent of SATA I or SATA II). Personally, having used SATA II SSDs for a few years, 3Gbps is plenty fast enough for me. Wanting to run VMs on the drives in the SATA III bays, I could still make use of the SATA III... If I were to upgrade those drives.

...wait - are you saying that a mini-PCIe Gen 2 slot has better throughput than a current "mSATA" slot? The WLAN slot labeled "Flash SATA" - is it Gen2 mini-PCIe? If so, that would actually be the best slot....if paired with a fast mini-PCIe SSD, right?

[erblemoof]

Originally Posted by ranranran

...wait - are you saying that a mini-PCIe Gen 2 slot has better throughput than a current "mSATA" slot? The WLAN slot labeled "Flash SATA" - is it Gen2 mini-PCIe? If so, that would actually be the best slot....if paired with a fast mini-PCIe SSD, right?

The full-length slot is definitely Gen 2, I don't know about the middle, half-length slot. If a mini-PCIe SSD worked in the slot, yes, that would be better than mSATA. However, a working mini-PCIe SSD remains to be seen. See my past posts on trying to install a Super Talent CoreStore MV.

I think the ultimate drive setup would be the Super Talent CoreStore MV 64GB (which is actually only 50GB, btw) in the 5Gbps SSD slot, then two 256GB Crucial M4 SATA III SSDs in the two bays, running with software RAID0 under whatever OS. Unfortunately, hardware RAID0 is not (yet?) supported in the BIOS. From the articles I've read, though, software RAID0 is just as fast, if not faster, as BIOS-enabled RAID0. That is, unless you have a dedicated RAID card, preferably with some type of cache, BIOS-RAID vs. software RAID will be about the same.

[erblemoof]

A new E6520 BIOS was released on May 17th. Not very exciting, though. the only fix/enhancement: "1. Added support for Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Hard Drives."

[ranranran]

Originally Posted by erblemoof

A new E6520 BIOS was released on May 17th. Not very exciting, though. the only fix/enhancement: "1. Added support for Full Disk Encryption (FDE) Hard Drives."

...ack, I think we need to see something along the lines of, "added full support for mSATA and mini PCIe SSD"