alittleteapot

That's exactly how I got mine, too. It's just a spacer to make the 2230 function just like the 2280, and I believe it fits into the primary drive caddy just fine. I sort of forgot it was in the primary slot or not when I initially got the laptop.

That was probably me ^____^ Essentially, I missed a really good discount... it was like 40% instead of the normal 30% and it was within a few weeks of 7760 launch, so when I called the sales representative, I begged/pleaded for as close to that as he could manage, and actually got four sticks of 32GB ECC SODIMMs for a Very Steep Discount and near full cost for the rest of the system, which combined, still got me within a few bucks of the original discount. It really pays to use the web configurator only as an aid to generate a quote, not to actually purchase a system. The "true cost" here is that you need to open up the chassis and get your hands a little dirty to install that RAM, and I found out that the backplate on my laptop had a captive screw that didn't quite engage, so they shipped me a new baseplate. Also, to remove the Precision battery, don't do what I did and try to remove the cable from the battery... remove the battery cable from the laptop, where it even has a little cloth handle for you. I'm sure there's some good YouTubes on this process by now. But, yes - I couldn't imagine buying anything higher than a base tier SSD from Dell. You could definitely try and see what the single cartridge RAM would cost by itself from Dell, I bet it's easier to install than four SODIMMS.

I think I tested this scenario on my PC, and I was getting really fast transfers from just PCI 3 NVME drives when they were put onto PCI 4 lanes. Sort of anecdotal, but it does make sense. On my 7760, 3 x 2 TB Samsung 970 EVO's as a Parity Pool gets 6525.91 MB/s Read Speeds 411.16 Write Speeds (formatted w/ ReFS). It seems fine for VMs, and yes, is definitely a convenience to have those drives in one pool.

Thanks for your insight, as always. In other words, the drives are not vastly different than the current generation of technology, except that the 3 NVME drives that share the PCH lanes can run twice as fast now (assuming they were all equipped with the PCI 4 drives). So, the 1 boot/OS drive + 3 RAID5 (or RAIDZ1 or Parity Spaces) drives is actually pretty close to the ideal configuration. This means the RAID10 configuration doesn't make too much sense... all drives would be speed-locked as if they were all sharing the same set of lanes, mitigating a lot of the benefits from that configuration.

This is a pretty interesting thread. Since I'm a heavy Hyper-V user, I have some thoughts to share. It's hard for me to find much information about efficiency cores with Hyper-V. Hyper-V is often a primary justification for getting one of these mobile workstations, and client Hyper-V is perfectly fine when you're doing software development. The best case scenario seems that the efficiency cores could run the host OS background things and make the VM-assigned cores run faster / less context switching. If I understand correctly, each NVME drive getting dedicated PCI 4.0 lanes is probably the best feature. Slap in four 4 TB Sabrent Rocket drives in RAID 10, and you'd have blindingly fast burst performance 8 TB RAID drive ... depending on how well these drives are cooled. Or, install some flavor of Unix that allows it to be a 12 TB RAIDZ1 pool. This makes a lot more sense compared to the previous generation, where it has one set of PCI 4 lanes for one drive, and one set of PCI 3 lanes shared for three drives.

Thanks for the link - I was stumbling with this some time in the past, especially with various vanilla Linux images. I wanted to experiment using various Unix based virtualization managers as an alternative to Hyper-V, but I always come back to Windows for the sheer plug-and-play of it.

I use wpd.app to clear out Telemetry and a lot of stupid pre-installed crap. It's really great at minimizing the clutter on a fresh install - you can even completely disable automatic updates if you need to. Reinstalling Windows on my laptops is done on an annual basis because they're used for development. Currently, I'm trying out Windows 11, and since all my development stuff is in Virtual Machines, it doesn't really matter what flavor of Windows is running the host. I understand if you choose to pre-install Ubuntu, that's it's much more important to image that as it has some secret sauce that would be hard/impossible to pull down from a default image.

I play a little bit of "State of Decay 2", at the hardest difficulty level, and "Frostpunk", again at the hardest difficulty. Frostpunk is the game you can play and win, then come back to it years later and realize you forgot how you did it and re-discover how to do it all over again.