SSD upgrade to Studio XPS 1645

Question

Hi...I have been using Dell products for years but this is my first post in Dell forums. I have a 3 year old, very lightly used Dell Studio XPS 1645 with optional ATI5730 Graphics card and optional 500GB Seagate HDD. Generally, it has been a very satisfying experience but I have encountered too many freezes, hangs, slow down periods and documents suddenly disappearing while being constructed, without trace, (which has just happened while typing the first attempt here). Lost everything and had to start again, from scratch.

I have a Samsung 840 PRO series 512GB SSD. Initially the 512GB SSD was intended for this laptop. However the high end desktop has an almost new Samsung 128GB 830 series O/s primary drive with an internal 1TB WD storage drive. The desktop has lost some of it's zip/ speed recently and I have reason to believe that the primary drive, the 128GB 830 SSD would benefit greatly from a clean install. I did have a serious invasion recently in the desktop which I located and removed but the unit has not been the same since. Why not drop the 128GB into the laptop and do a compete new installation on the 512GB 840PRO SSD for the more heavily used, more work oriented desktop?

The laptop is used primarily for browsing, emails, photos, movies through 50" top end LG tv with Apple tv as well, as a family room convenience. If it was more reliable I would also use it more for my research work purposes as well.

Apparently the DVD drive in the Dell can be removed and the area used to fit a storage drive. If this is the case, do I have an option here to fit a high end HDD storage drive, 500GB and above, or to use an external USB drive as storage? The external drive has the hassle of being externally attached by cable which is unsightly and physically inconvenient in such as a family room. Either way it would give me the much faster, more reliable 128GB SSD as primary os drive with essential apps and programs plus as separate drive for storage and backup. What additional hardware items would be required to fit such a storage drive in the DVD drive area?

Alternately (perhaps) I could obtain an identical 128GB Samsung 830 series SSD and set them up in RAID0 (striping) for additional speed or RAID1 mirror, eliminating the need for backups and use USB external storage?

I have all the original DVDs with OS, apps etc, everything that came with the original purchase. BIOS has been updated to A13 and all drivers have been updated from the Dell website. I have no doubt the problems I have been having with this laptop stem from the HDD, including the now very slow startup and shut down times. This unit is now out of it's warranty period.

An alternate approach might be that I do this unit up for my wife and then look at a new, lighter, quicker, somewhat smaller and more portable unit for myself.

Thanks.

DELL-Rajath N · Accepted Answer

Hi rapidred74,

I appreciate the time taken to provide a detailed description about your requirements. Studio XPS 1645 supports 128GB and 256GB SSD's in the hard drive bay. You can replace the HDD with the Samsung SSD for improving the system perform. The system uses a slot loading optical drive and you can replace it with the 500GB HDD using a slot load drive compatible converter, that can be purchased from a local computer store or online.

Please let me know if you need further information.

ejn63 · Accepted Answer

There isn't a limit of 256G on the capacity of the SSD. However, the system probably came with a 9.5 mm hard drive and the SSD is more likely 7 mm in height - you may need an adapter to mount the drive such that it will connect to the system board. Retail kits from Samsung and Crucial include this adapter -- drives from others (or drives sold bare) don't. The adapter you'll need will look like this:

eshop.macsales.com/item/OWC/SSD95MMSPCR/

rapidred74 · Answer

Thanks Rajath, that confirms what my own thoughts were initially. The current 500GB HDD is 3+ years old and is definitely 'suspect'. HDD prices have dropped dramatically, it doesn't make sense to me to do the necessary work and trust the suspect drive. I'll bite the bullet and buy a new 500GB high end HDD and fit that in the DVD drive slot.

Since the warranty is now dead and I'm going to open up the laptop anyway, ?are there any additional hardware upgrades that I could do to keep this very good machine going for another 2-3 years with performance comparable to later laptops?

Finally, what motherboard is fitted to this machine?

Thanks again, very much appreciated.

rapidred74

ejn63 · Answer

The single best upgrade you can do is a solid state drive. You can indeed keep your hard drive as a storage drive using a third-party DVD slot adapter (but you cannot use it for booting the system).

If you have a 64-bit operating system, you can upgrade to 8G of RAM.

The processor may be upgradeable - but that almost never makes economic sense.

The video chip is the one part of the system that cannot be upgraded.

The mainboard is a system-proprietary model built for Dell -- Quanta Computer is the ODM of these models.

burkejp · Answer

Why is the laptop limited at 256GB and is there a setting I need to change in order to get my SSD to work. It will not recognize the new SSD I installed?

burkejp · Answer

Thanks the Dell techs answer didn't make any sense to me. Do you happen to know if these laptops were SATA 2 or SATA 3 interface?

ejn63 · Answer

SATA 3G.

remsan03 · Answer

Hi ejn63, I want to upgrade to SSD and use my old HDD as the hard drive for saving personal files as suggested. Remove the DVD slot and place the old HDD there.

But when I opened the machine, it doesn't look like a straightforward case of opening the screw and lift the DVD drive. A tech guy at a computer shop told me that if the DVD drive would look like those that are common in desktop PC (The DVD drive that comes with an external covering), we could easily just pull it out and place the HDD in a caddy. But with this DVD slot, he couldn't figure out how to remove the DVD drive. I haven't try to remove the DVD drive, but as I look to it, I too can't figure out how to remove it. There's a piece of metal slab covering the dvd drive. Any idea?

Second question, I'm running on BIOS A09 May 11, 2010. If I put in my new Samsung SSD Pro 256Gb, do I need a BIOS update so that my XPS 1645 can recognize the SSD?

Locked Topics – Laptops General

SSD upgrade to Studio XPS 1645

Was this post helpful?