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April 15th, 2020 09:00

Inspiron 5482 2-in-1: How to replace a (SSD) drive?

My laptop came with a 256GB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive. I wonder if it's possible to replace it with a bigger drive and if so, what steps should I take?

For the sake of discussion I have software to make an image backup of my existing drive and boot from a Macrium Reflect recovery USB and the image backup will be on an external disk connected to the laptop.

4 Operator

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14K Posts

April 15th, 2020 09:00

@tilleulas long the drive physically fits (most NVMe SSDs are the "M.2 2280" size), then it should work.  There some very high capacity SSDs that achieve their capacity by placing flash memory chips on both sides of the board, and on some laptops with very tight space constraints, those won't fit because the system only accepts "single-sided" SSDs.  I don't know if the Inspiron 5482 works like that.  But in terms of what steps to take, if you go to support.dell.com, search for your model name, and click Documentation, you'll find a Service Manual that will show you how to perform the replacement.  If the new SSD you'll be installing is also NVMe, then if you're using Reflect you should just be able to restore an image backup onto the new SSD.  Worst case if the system doesn't boot, go back into your Reflect Rescue Media and run Fix Boot Problems.  Also make sure that your captured image includes all partitions from the source disk.  Some people just capture an image of their C partition, which isn't enough to get modern UEFI-based systems to boot.  Good luck!

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274.2K Posts

November 18th, 2020 22:00

I hope you don't mind asking a quick question.

I have  the same 5482.

Is there a way to tell if a M.2 Sata (B&M connector) will be compatible ?

 

Thanks for your time to read.

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