Saturday, March 01, 2014

Bought a Samsung 840 EVO For My Laptop!

So, I've always wanted to install an SSD drive in one of my gaming rigs. Initially I wanted to install it on my main desktop gaming rig, but that system hasn't been stable in awhile and I've been almost totally reliant on my Alienware gaming laptop, so I decided to focus on using an SSD in that instead. Part of the problem is that the laptop is using 2 x 750GB Seagate drives in RAID0. No, it is not fast, but I have a crap ton of drive space. I did not want to lose any of that space, so in order for me to have an SSD, I'd have to go big. As well, the M17x R3 has issues with SSDs on drive 0 (of 0 and 1)...they had to nix the speed (so no 6GB/s with this drive in this system). I can go SSD on both drive slots if I wanted and even set them up in RAID0, but I wouldn't be able use SATA 3, only SATA 2. Dell has disabled SATA 3 in all BIOS versions over A08 for this system, also (I'm at A09...it's been like that since I bought it...I've had no reason to update to a higher version). So, I bought 1 x 750GB Samsung 840 EVO. I will break my RAID0 setup and replace the drive in slot 1 with the SSD (and I'll have an extra 750GB drive just sitting around, I guess...I can always throw it into one of my other laptops). I'll use the SSD for my games (BF4 and Arma 3, amongst others), and use the other drive as my data/archive drive. For now, I can live with bandwidth limitation. I can always reuse this drive if I decided to upgrade to an R4 or R5 later on. I'll post my OS reinstall experience a bit later.

No comments: