Dell super special on ivy bridge

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Batman

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#101572 4-May-2012 09:22

dell have released quad core ivy bridge into their inspiron 15R ... AUD899 or NZD1299 upwards ...

I'm looking at the $1699 model, and it has mSATA 32GB SSD and a 1TB 5400rpm hdd ...

worth it? what is an mSATA 32GB SSD??

Batman

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#619433 4-May-2012 12:15

*bump

jbard

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#619447 4-May-2012 12:38

Pretty decent deal but 32GB SSD seems a bit small these days.

Depends on what you usually have installed on you PC I guess but I would be much happier with a 64GB.

steveh8459

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#620748 7-May-2012 06:26

Agreed 32Gb sounds way to small....

hangon

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#620856 7-May-2012 10:40

joker97: dell have released quad core ivy bridge into their inspiron 15R ... AUD899 or NZD1299 upwards ...

I'm looking at the $1699 model, and it has mSATA 32GB SSD and a 1TB 5400rpm hdd ...

worth it? what is an mSATA 32GB SSD??

mSATA SSD is like an expansion card. It doesn't occupy a hd bay (but an expansion slot) so you can still have a 1TB drive for mass storage (some notebook provide flexible expansion bays so you can install more than 1 standard or low height 2.5" hd but it's nearly distinct now).

performance wise mSATA SSD can be as good as a standard SSD (same vendor, model, gen). but higher capacity SSD usually means higher performance due to more pipes running in parallel.

rhysb

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#621097 7-May-2012 16:55

With Sandy Bridge and now Ivy Bridge, Intel has introduced something they call Smart Response Technology. Basically it allows you to use a small SSD as a cache for a larger traditional hard drive.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review/2

alexx

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#621134 7-May-2012 17:45

Seems to a standard feature of many of the newer Ivy Bridge motherboards.
For example, I just got a GA-Z77-D3H (desktop ATX format) mb and it supports mSATA.

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4140

I think you might be able to use it either way - small mSATA boot drive, or mSATA cache for a larger drive.

However looking at some of these mSATA drives, it almost always seems better value to buy a regular SSD as you get more GB for similar money, but perhaps small physical size is more important in a laptop.

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