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mSATA as main Drive??
Hi all! I recently purchased a Dell 17r Special Edition #7720 Has a 3rd gen 3630 & uses a msata to help speed things up with a 32gb SSD My question is--Can I use the mSATA as the main boot drive??i would like to remove the 32mSATA & use the 2- 1tb drives as storage only & use a 256mSATA as my main boot drive. Is this OK?
DELL-Rajath N
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1.8K Posts
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January 17th, 2013 08:00
Hi jaybowtie,
You can use the mSATA drive as the main boot drive that has a capacity of 128GB or higher. You will need to change the SATA operation setting in the BIOS to AHCI and select it as the primary boot device. You may have to reinstall Windows 7 on the mSATA drive.
ghees
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January 17th, 2013 12:00
It does work like a charm, I'm typing right now on a 7720 with a 256G Crucial M4 installed in the Msata, and this machine boots into Win8 in about SEVEN seconds.
Graham Jupp
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January 17th, 2013 16:00
Whilst it seems to be possible from what several people have said, I have also heard that the mSATA port in the Inspiron 7720 is only SATA II speed and hence may bottleneck a SATA III mSATA drive. The other 2 drive ports are apparantly SATA III compatible so an SATA III SSD drive will be able to run at full speed in those ports. If you have already purchased an mSATA for this purpose you could always get an mSATA to 2.5 SSD adapter for it and run it in the spare drive port to take full advantage of its speed.
DRRLN
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April 23rd, 2013 23:00
I have a 256GB mSATA drive now in a 7720 (17R SE) running BIOS version A13. Installed W7x64 on the mSATA - fine - but can only boot the system when the W7 install disk is present (and BIOS in legacy mode). System is booting from mSATA, but will not boot on it's own from BIOS (no W7 DVD in drive and no other HDD in system). Using AHCI mode and both UEFI and Legacy modes won't allow boot. I think I need to enable the BIOS to see and boot from the mSATA drive, but I can see no way of providing access to anything other than Primary/Secondary HDD, removable media, CD/DVD, network...
Any suggestions? Or does it just not work with the BIOS restrictions on the machine?
BTW - I'm REALLY impressed with the boot time into W7 with this! (Just annoyed that I need the W7 CD in the drive in order to get it to start).
Any help will be really appreciated.
BigJohnBoy
1 Message
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July 8th, 2016 16:00
Hello, I noticed that it was stated that you need a 128Gb msata, will it work with a 64Gb msata?
Thanks,
BigJohnBoy
ghees
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July 9th, 2016 03:00
64GB is pretty TINY for a windows boot disk. 120 GB is a good enough size ( IMHO).
Incidentally, I just (finally ) updated my 7720 to BIOS A17 and (whoops!) ran into some "fun" as it nuked my previous boot settings. Had to go in and manually create a new boot entry, then browse to the 64-bit bootloader in BOOT folder ( after setting the UEFI secure boot option). By default, it was trying to boot into NETWORK bios ( had to unplug the network cable and restart...)
Suggest to anyone upgrading from A11 BIOS that they research the BIOS boot settings VERY carefully before attempting. I had read that A12 cures the noisy fans issue... and then discovered there was an A17 and figured... "why not"?? Incidentally, now that I have A17 BIOS, the fans to spin down nicely