Upgrade components inside Dell Latitude L5401 beyond the manual's specs

I can confirm that a 512gb M.2 2242 SATA SSD can be installed on the WWAN card slot as a second drive. I'm using a Transcend model MTS430S TS512GMTS430S https://www.transcend-info.com/Products/No-981

@jrivam @Stefan_8 

Dell manuals are good for referring to what was sold with the laptop.

They are not referring to the limitation of the hardware.

Regards,

U2

The manuals DO refer the limitations of the hardware. In this particular case, the Support Manual says: 

Storage
Your computer supports one of the following configurations:

2.5-inch 5400rpm hard-disk drive / SATA up to 6 Gbps / Up to 1 TB
2.5 inch 7200rpm Hard-drive drive / SATA up to 6 Gbps / Up to 1 TB
M.2 2230 solid-state drive / PCIe NVMe PCIe Gen3x2 NVMe  up to 16 Gbps / Up to 512 GB
M.2 2280 solid-state drive / PCIe NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe  up to 32 Gbps / Up to 1 TB
M.2 2280 solid-state drive / Class 20 SATA Class 20 / Up to 512 GB

I have encounter myself many times when the hardware only supported what was stated on the specs. And other times when it could be exceeded, and the drive I tested is a 512gb M.2 2242 SATA SSD that was not listed in the specs, and that was going to be used on the WWAN port, hence the uncertainty

@jrivam 

Using your own post as reference.

1. 2.5-inch 5400rpm hard-disk drive / SATA up to 6 Gbps / Up to 1 TB
2. 2.5 inch 7200rpm Hard-drive drive / SATA up to 6 Gbps / Up to 1 TB
3. M.2 2230 solid-state drive / PCIe NVMe PCIe Gen3x2 NVMe  up to 16 Gbps / Up to 512 GB
4. M.2 2280 solid-state drive / PCIe NVMe PCIe Gen3x4 NVMe  up to 32 Gbps / Up to 1 TB
5. M.2 2280 solid-state drive / Class 20 SATA Class 20 / Up to 512 GB

1 and 2:

2TB or 3Tb will work just fine.

4 and 5: 

https://www.crucial.com/ssd/p1/ct2000p1ssd8/ct17451670

This part is 100% compatible with Latitude 5401:

https://www.crucial.com/ssd/p5/ct2000p5ssd8/ct18185276

This part is 100% compatible with Latitude 5401:

Now as far as memory is concerned I would bet that 64GB is the max memory.

As the 5401's CPU and chipset can handle 128GB.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/191047/intel-core-i7-9850h-processor-12m-cache-up-to-4-60-ghz.html

Best regards,

U2

I didn't have any problems installing it, just placed, turned on the computer and was recognized on BIOS right away, same in Windows 10. As this is a SATA SSD, the speeds are: Read: 550mbs, Write: 490mbs. I suppose that an NVMe drive will have a better performance, but this costs less, and it is not bad at all.

I also installed TS512GMTS430S and first impression is that it works.

But the drive disappeared after some hours with following errors:

• An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\DR0 during a paging operation.
• Disk 0 has been surprise removed.

• The system failed to flush data to the transaction log. Corruption may occur in VolumeId: D:, DeviceName: \Device\HarddiskVolume2.

  Failure status: A device which does not exist was specified.

  Device GUID: {ccd3d99d-1969-be12-a458-2caa6f4673e2}
  Device manufacturer:
  Device model: TS512GMTS430S
  Device revision: R0906A
  Device serial number: G279470306
  Bus type: RAID

  Adapter serial number:

The only way to bring it back is to shut down and start the notebook (reboot does not work)

• OS: Windows 10
• The S.M.A.R.T. valus looked very good (almost or close to zero).
• But the temperature of the drive was relatively hot (according to SpeedFan and by touching the disk).

Any ideas?