18 R1, (2014 model AMD R9 M290X) SSD and HDD upgrade

Thanks for the help ejn63

Recently Samsung has launched a 8TB SSD (870 QVO SATA III 2.5”) 

Will Alienware 18 support 8TB per drive? or 4TB is the Max safe limit I can go upto without having troubles 

Thanks in advance

Dual-Slot M.2 Drive to SATA Adapter for 2.5inch Drive Bay

Don't forget you can buy a SSD/HDD caddy for the Optical Drive port to add another storage option. There isn't much use for an internal optical drive these days. It was actually a factory option from Dell so the user could have 4 way RAID 0.

Something like this

Have you removed the palmrest/keyboard yet? You may need to clean out the fans and heatsinks and reapply the thermal compound on the GPU’s and CPU. 

Hi @crimsom @ejn63 @mattyb3 ,

I went in for the Samsung 870 EVO 2TB internal SSD

I replaced the 2 mechanical storage drives with 2 of Samsung 870 EVO 2TB SSD drives

I don't need a lot of storage. It takes me approximately 5 years to fill up a 1 TB drive and my laptop is already 7 years old so did not want to spend a lot of money on high-end storage drives because I don't know how many years more my laptop will last

As @crimsom is already aware, my laptop is now having startup issues

I don't know if installing these new drives were the reason for the issue, I don't think so, not sure. I installed the drives on Wednesday and everything was working fine and smooth. Then had trouble with my laptop booting on Saturday. The issue of overheating on my laptop was there earlier before I installed these new drives. The laptop would get heated and shut down like once in a week and after like 15-20 mins it would turn back on again, not really troublesome but in the past few days it was getting excessively hot and from Saturday onward I am having trouble to boot it up. I have given my laptop to a dell service center lets see what they have to say. Will post the update on the below link   

You can read more on it in the below link

https://www.dell.com/community/Alienware/18-R1-not-turning-on/m-p/7881154#M42887

Thank you all for your suggestions, tips and help

Hi @mattyb3 

No, I have not yet removed the palm rest and keyboard yet. Laptop right now is with the service center. They said they will do the necessary cleaning of the cooling system for me including applying the thermal paste to CPU and GPU. I am not confident of doing this job myself so that's why I gave it to the Dell service center. In case the service center is not going to be doing it then I will watch some videos from Youtube and do it myself, no other option. 

Fans are clean but not sure about the condition of the thermal paste, heat pads on GPU's, sinks etc. I have not checked the condition of these things since 2014

Hope the service center technicians do a good job otherwise I will have to do it myself.

Ok, that's fair enough. It can be daunting opening up and working on laptops like these. They did make it a lot more difficult on the 18" laptops (and even the 14" ones) to access the heatsinks. Fluff and dust can build up over the heatsink fins in just a few years and it can cause a major blockage of heat inside the laptop. 

It's not overly difficult to do yourself but you can damage ribbon cables if not done properly and there are a lot of screws to remove on the 18 palmrest. 

Hopefully the place is a proper Dell service center and not just a local repair shop as they may not know how to do it properly and cause more damage. I wouldn't trust local repair shops with my calculator. 

Hi @mattyb3 

I just received an update from the Dell Service center

The following problems have been detected with my laptop-

1. No Power issue- I/O Failure-Replacement of I/O Chipset suggested or replacement of motherboard but Dell no longer manufactures the Alienware 18 motherboard so I have been told by the service center that they are going to be replacing the I/O chipset which is available

2. HDMI port failure

3. Battery Failure

4. mSATA SSD has failed. Not getting detected (This is a Samsung 840 evo 500GB SSD)