How is the extra mSATA SSD disk used/configured in a Dell XPS laptop?
- by Mark
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:
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:
Is anything installed on it (e.g. OS files or a boot loader) or is it just used as swap space?
Is the m-SATA drive visible as a lettered drive in Windows? (I'd guess not if it's used for swap file only.)
Is this unusual configuration likely to cause any problems later down the line - e.g. when upgrading to Windows 8?
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.
