Dell Precision M4300

My existing Dell Latitude D600 is nearly 4 years old and as it's Dell's year end and the discounting is good I though I'd treat myself to a new laptop.

My main requirements are 1400x1050 LCD, 4GB RAM, Core-2 duo and good battery life.

Dell appear to have left us developers in the dark these days and the choice of laptops with a decent vertical resolution has dwindled considerably - you either have the choice of a huge 17" screen and a luggable rather than portable machine or a D520 class machine which I've never been impressed at.

Being D Series compatible is important to me as I've got a number of peripherals that fit in the d-dock and docking stations at various places where I work - so I've ended up opting for the 1680x1050 resolution 15.4" screen of the precision M4300.

My first impressions are that it's big - much bigger than I was hoping for and next to my D600 it really is in a different league. I really hope that there's a revolt to continual use of wide-screen displays - they're very nice - but you do end up with an impractical display configuration. As a developer we always work on "tall and thin" code and how many people you know work on word documents in landscape mode? Is the modern laptop really dedicated to people who watch DVD's? If so how about those of us who actually work on our laptops for a living?

Well it's a big laptop and unfortunately that also means it's a heavy laptop - it's got a good array of ports - everything you'd imagine really from 3xUSB, eSATA, firewire, PCMCIA and Cardbus, VGA, serial, NIC, modem, and s-video. What's dissappointingly missing is a card reader of some variety which means I'll end up installing the little PCMCIA flash readers that I've used in my previous machines. A shame really given the huge amount of empty space there must be inside the case.

Performance wise though the size does have it's advantages - the screen is good, and the processor (2.2 GHz core-2 duo) is spot on - as is the 4GB RAM. I'm running Win XP 64bit so I can actually use all 4GB unlike many with 4GB installed. This laptop also has a nVidia QuadroFX 360M with 512MB onboard so I won't be sharing core RAM with the video card. You'd also have hoped that they'd have got a 370M into it but no such luck so this machine won't be the fastest around for Vista - personally I see that as an advantage rather than a disadvantage as I'll be switching to Windows Server 2008 once it's finally released rather than going anywhere near Vista.

The machine came with a 160GB 7200RPM SATA disk from Seagate which is about as good as 2.5" disks get these days - I did some performance stats with H2BENCHW and it really is a good disk, shame it's had to be removed to make way for an SSD.

Which cunningly leads me onto the most crucial bit - the Samsung 64GB SATA SSD - supplied by overclockers.co.uk at the whopping price of £499+VAT (that's 2/3rds of the cost of the laptop on top). Overclockers.co.uk have found a way of supplying these disks to the general public and this disk turned up Dell branded - they must be purchasing direct from Dell which sounds about right as I believe Samsung have agreed to supply to OEMs only to start off with.

Compared to the 32GB PATA SSD that I have in the D600 the 64GB SATA SSD is a far more polished product - rather than exposed chips in a plastic case the SATA model appears to be a single billet of aluminium with space carved out for the electronics - a much more appealing thing to behold but still far too expensive for the average user.

The first thing that I've really noticed with the SSD compared to the mechanical disk is how quiet the machine has now become - I hadn't realised quite how much noise the original disk was contributing whilst I was benchmarking and testing the original disk but now that the SSD is in I realise that the CPU fans only rarely cut in so the noise from the machine was almost entirely from the disk - not the sound of the heads moving but just a background noise of the spinning disk which has now thankfully gone - I'm finally beginning to like this machine.

Speed I guess is the reason for the SSD and I'm a bit dissappointed with the benchmarks - it's not looking any faster than the PATA model. I thought I was buying the Samsung 100MB/s model but it looks like that isn't the one in the market right now and 50MB/s is what I'm getting. That's slower than the 105MB/s I got from the 7200 RPM disk but as with any SSD it's the access times that count. Average Random Seek times have gone from the original 14.4ms (very respectable for a 2.5" 7200RPM disk) down to the almost insignificant 0.26ms - that's 55x faster which means that it can truly sustain 50MB/s at all times rather than just the occasional burst to 105MB/s that a rotating disk can manage.

In the real world what this means is that I'm booting from on-switch to login prompt in approximately 20 seconds - not forgetting that this is a machine with a 6GB page file, a full array of development tools including SQL 2k5 developer edition and then from login prompt so usable desktop is almost instantaneous and gloriously silent. That's quick enough for me.

So to rate the Precision M4300 - I'd have to score it:

Processor 9/10
Screen 9/10
Weight 4/10
Size 4/10
Disk 7/10 (original)
Disk 9/10 (SATA SSD)

Overall 8/10 - it's the size and weight of the machine that's dissappointing especially when you consider what Apple can do with the MacBook Air and what Asus can do with the Eee PC.

Installation of XP on Samsung 32GB SSD

Finally I've got enough work out of the way that I can install XP on my new SSD drive.

My current setup is a Dell Latitude with 100GB 7200RPM 2.5" disk + a 32GB Samsung SSD in the media bay. Using an external USB DVD drive I've installed XP onto the SSD.

Try as I might I couldn't get the laptop to recognise the SSD as the C: drive so the D: drive it is. I guess the advantage is that it's a parallel install to my previous XP which is on the actual C: drive and I can dual boot between them.

There's a couple of things I'm expecting to go wrong - lots of poorly written applications might assume a C: drive but so far so good and everything is behaving nicely.

There's a fair old software stack installed on my laptop and it's taken most of the day to tickle it along. The basics are Office 2k7, Visual Studio 2k8 beta, SQL server 2k5, Oracle 10g, Firefox + add-ons, IE + add-ons, Sharpreader, Eclipse, FlexBuilder 2.01, Flexbuilder 3 beta, TortoiseSVN... the list just goes on and on - and that's not even including all the patches.

The SSD drive itself is lovely and quick - things like Eclipse jump into life especially when you can see it (or rather not see it!) scanning through the plug-ins.

A couple of apps have proven their flexbility:

Firefox - I was able to copy my profile from the C: drive straight into my profile on the D: drive and all of my favourites, history, usernames etc have come straight across.

Likewise wth Sharpreader - copying the folder from my old profile into my new one has brought across everything I'd hoped for.

Even Skype played nice which was a surprise and once again copying the contents of my profile has brought across everything including the chat histories which I find invaluable.

RAMSAN go to 2TB

The guys over at Texas Memory Systems have announced their 2TB flash based RAM SAN.

With more bandwidth and I/O's that most of us will ever see in a lifetime they truly are the future for anyone with a database performance issue.

I'm a little surprised that they've moved away from the older architecture which was based around using DDR and a RAID array of slow old SAS drives for secondary storage.

Evidently when buying SSD's in high enough volumes they come in at a price level which competes with DDR.

Solid State Disks

Well I finally have my Samsung 32GB Solid State Disk installed in the media bay of my laptop and boy is it quick. I bought it from Scan.co.uk - my usually hardware supplier and it turned up prompty as always.

I've yet to install an OS on it - just awaiting an external USB CD-ROM drive so that I can do an XP install but my initial thoughts are WOW.

I've done some basic benchmarking with h2wbench and the results are available here. To summarise the transfer rates are pretty reasonable - far better than I expected and the access times are beyond belief! The sooner the humble platter goes the way of the floppy disk the better.

More results once I've got XP install which should be later this week.