Question: Some machines in the new XPS laptop range from Dell come with a regular, large (500GB+) HDD and an additional 32GB m-SATA SSD. The only detail I can find about this extra drive on the Dell site is this:
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Store your important files, multimedia and photos with XPS 15 s large hard drive options. To get instant access to your media, choose an optional mSATA solid-state drive (SSD) that can boot up to twice as fast as a regular hard drive and resumes in less than 1 second.
I’d like to know more about how this extra drive is set up and used, specifically:
As usual, Dell’s sales team haven’t been able to help. If anyone’s actually got a Dell machine with this or a similar hard drive set-up and can give a definitive answer rather than speculation I’ll accept the answer.
Answer: Dell laptops with an mSATA SSD built in are in a RAID configuration enabling Intel’s Smart Response tech to store a cache of the most used files on the SSD. This means faster boot times, application start times, etc. You can upgrade the built in mSATA to a bigger SSD, then go to the BIOS and change drive configuration to AHCI. You would have to re-install your OS but you can then install it on the SSD and use the hard disk as storage. This is my configuration and so far I have been happy with it with 4 second boot times to Windows 8. You really do not gain much if any battery life doing this, but the performance advantages in themselves are outstanding. I would caution that if you go this route, you should NOT install Intel’s AHCI drivers as they are not compatible with the hard disk and would cause it to disappear for Windows (not the BIOS). Just use Microsoft’s drivers and you’ll be fine.