Studio XPS 1645 Hard drive replacement

Thanks, LawrenceSoCal--I'll check out the anandtech tech article. I guess the gist of it is that you should keep >25% head room/unused?

I got the 250 GB and seriously doubt I'll use much more than half the space.

One thing: doing a clean install on an SSD sure cured my dread of clean installs: It was cake and over very quickly.

dg

> I guess the gist of it is that you should keep >25% head room/unused?

for optimal I/O performance under busy conditions (lots of multi-threaded apps doing a fair amount of read/writes) - yes.  otherwise, less spare area is fine.  notice the article is referencing basically a SSD torture test.  to survive that test, and perform well, 25% spare area is needed.  for normal users, less spare area should be fine (on my 120GB drive iwas in the 15-20$ free range and it worked fine).  Occassionally using more space is fine - just don't get down to 1-2% free space, then use it that way for an extended period of time that way.

in addition to I/O performance on all SSDs, extra spare area allows SSD wear-levelling algoriths to do their thing which will greatly extend the life of NAND flash chips (and with the 3,000 P/E cycles on 25nm NAND, that is a good thing).

Interesting article that talks about P/E cycles here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6337/samsung-ssd-840-250gb-review/4

dg

I had to replace my HDD and when installed the drivers above for my system the driver for SATA Intel Matrix Storage Manager - Notebooks, http://ftp.dell.com/SATA/R233884.exe just tells me that this computer does not meet the minimum standards. My BIOS offers AHCI and ATA modes and would not install win7 64 Ultimate with anything but ATA mode or it would flash blue screen on boot up of windows. This driver has all the code I need to go back to AHCI; what do i do? This is the same driver that is offered on dell site for my service tag; therefore, It should work and I upgraded to Solid State SATA drive so there should not be any issue there as well.

Are you installing from a disc that has Service Pack 1 included or not?

Have you tried using later ones direct from Intel: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=23060&ProdId=2101&lang=eng

I would suggest asking dell to send you the hard drive in the mail and you send them the old one and install the new one yourself.  Also ask dell if the hard drive has a recovery partition for microsoft.  If not, you will have to burn a copy of your licensed os to a disk and install a fresh copy of microsoft.  

Thank you natakuc4 for replying on an old post.

I am running win 7 64 bit ultimate with every update and I am up to date on OS according to microsoft upddate.

The only 2 dell driver updates that say the same thing "Your computer does not meet the minimum specifications. Application will now exit" are R263958 (Intel Rapid Storage Technology, v.9.6.0.1014, A02) and R233884 (Intel Matrix Storage Manager - Notebooks, v.8.9.0.1023, A0).

I did go to  tried using later ones direct from Intel:  downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx and Intel seemed to have the same version and had the same result. I ran Intel's inpsection software for driver searches and it only provided an update to wifi card.

When I replaced my SATA HDD with a SATA3 SDD my goal was to obviously improve performance score on an already good 1st gen quad core i7 system. The SATA3 SDD is backwards compatible with SATA1 & 2 so I do not understand how there could be any conflict for the drivers installing this time when I have had all along. I just want to continue to run in AHCI to take advatage of any addtional processing performance which is needed.

Shag I appreciate your 2 posts; however, they do not address my issues. Thanks. If anyone else has any Ideas of why I cannot get the 2 drivers that are realated to SATA  AHCI drivers from Intel to install I would appreciate it so I can switch from ATA now for my SDD as I did on my last installation with the HDD that the drive has failed.

Please see Windows Reinstallation Guide/A Clean install of Windows 7:

http://philipyip.wordpress.com/dell-community-forums/

Follow Step 6 using the F6-Flpy drivers here https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=17882 

Change the BIOS Settings back to AHCI before beginning the Windows 7 installation.

Load these during the Windows 7 setup (see Step 8 which mentions loading the SATA drivers. This should remove your BSOD and allow you to install with AHCI.

Natakuc4,

I will go over all the information provided from the Clean install of Win 7; however, this recent installation was from a new out of the box SSD as my HDD had completely failed.

I did try the F6 flpy intel drivers before; however, it was suggested to me to install at a different place; I will follow the steps provided (Step 8) and see if that allows the switch back to AHCI from ATI as it should be. It seems that in the pior issues with these drivers that many other Windows versions have had the same bug; hope yours works.