XPS 13 9360, upgrade options

If you're looking at an XPS 13 9360 as you posted in the thread title, then there is no way that "128GB 2.5 inch SATA Solid State drive" is an option.  The XPS 13 9360 only has a single M.2 slot, and that slot can accept M.2 SATA or M.2 NVMe SSDs, but the system does not support 2.5" SATA drives at all because there simply isn't room in the chassis.  The XPS 15 9560 supports 2.5" hard drives in the versions that include the smaller battery, but that's it.  So either you're looking at the wrong system or that's an error in that system's spec list.

The 128GB M.2 Solid State drive option doesn't make it clear whether it's SATA or NVMe, although since they don't explicitly say PCIe/NVMe, I'm going to guess SATA -- although I guess if you'll be upgrading the SSD anyway, it doesn't really matter.  The XPS 13 9360 definitely supports NVMe no matter which version you buy, and I have personally installed a Samsung 960 Evo into an XPS 13 9360.  It works fine except for the fact that due to the XPS 13's NVMe interface design, performance will be limited to about 1.8 GB/s rather than the SSD's max of 3GB/s+.  This has been discussed a few times on this forum.  The previous generation Samsung 950 should also work fine, with the same performance limitation.  But the storage is absolutely not soldered onto the motherboard; memory is, but not storage.

@jphughan Thank you and you should to work for Dell, jajaja really, they need a boss

Hey, thank for the answer man, you are very help full . so thanks.

this is the link what I am buying, Link Dell xps13 128SATA

And like I understand you, the normal should to be 128Gb M.2 SSD RIght, and this can be update easy to PCIe NMVe Samsung 950 its correct?

Thanks @jphughan

The 960 Evo is a great choice.  I'm a fan of Samsung SSDs in general compared to other brands for a variety of reasons.  Note however that because of the way the 9360 handles its NVMe interface, sequential performance will be limited to around 1.8 GB/s, whereas the 960 Evo could do up to about 3 GB/s on sequential reads.  The XPS 13 9370 changed this, but of course that doesn't help you.  Technically this means you could buy a slower and less expensive SSD without losing any actual performance in that system, but again I like Samsung SSDs in general, so I personally would still get a 960 Evo -- and NVMe SSDs will still be much faster than SATA.  But this also means that it's not worth paying more for the 970 Evo since again, even the 960 can't perform to maximum capacity in this system.

Hello @jphughan

what do you recomend in 500G ssd for the 9360, to get the best speed from the xps 13 and no pay to much.

for example the samsung 960 are over $20 the new 970.

what do you recomend for my 9360 i5-8250

Regards

thank you @jphughan I dont have enought to got for a 9370... :( 

but I am looking in amazon and the 970 are for 199 and the 960 for 220,

I am looking for the 950 but it doesnt exist I think.

the 970 is less expensinve, it will work too?

Regards

thank you again @jphughan (Y)

hello @jphughan i have the 9360 and the samsung 970

what i need to do to clone the actual 128 into the 500gigabyte nvme?

regards

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@roghax85 wrote:

i have the 9360 and the samsung 970

what i need to do to clone the actual 128 into the 500gigabyte nvme?

regards

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Read through this whole thing before you proceed.

Go into your BIOS Setup and see whether your SATA Operation setting is set to AHCI or RAID.  If it's RAID, this is actually easier.  If it's AHCI, it will be a bit more difficult.  You can't just change from AHCI to RAID for an existing Windows installation though; that's something that's normally done before performing a clean install.  There may be some multi-step process to make it happen, but I'm not sure.  Anyway, since the XPS 13 9360 only has one internal SSD connector, then unless you have an M.2 to SATA/USB adapter, a direct clone isn't possible since you won't have a way to have both disks attached at the same time.  So you'll have to capture an image of your current drive and then restore it to the new drive instead -- which means you'll need something like an external hard drive or network share where you can store the image backup temporarily.  You'll also need a flash drive that you can turn into bootable media temporarily.  Here goes:

- Download and install Macrium Reflect Free.  Create the Rescue Media they ask about.  Then capture an image of your entire disk to a file somewhere.

- Reboot your system and boot from the flash drive to make sure it works.  If so, shut your system down and swap SSDs, then power your system up and boot from your Rescue Media again.

- Restore the image you previously captured onto the new disk.  To do that properly, take a look at Steps 4-6 of Macrium's article here -- it's about cloning, but those steps pertain to restores too.  If the partition you wish to expand to fill your new space is NOT the last one on your disk, then you'll want to use the "Restored Partition Properties" function shown in that article to specify the desired new sizes of any partition you want to resize so that it happens DURING the restore operation, otherwise you might end up with some other partition sitting between the partition(s) you want to resize and the new empty space on the disk, which will prevent expanding the partition(s) you want.

- Once the Destination row has been "staged" with a layout that you're happy with, let the restore run.

- When it completes, if the SATA Operation setting in your BIOS was set to RAID, you should be able to just reboot and see Windows come up.  If it doesn't come up, go back to your Rescue Media and run Fix Boot Problems and then it should work.  If the SATA Operation mode was set to AHCI, then the problem is that the Windows installation you cloned from a SATA-based SSD won't be configured to load the NVMe driver that will now be required to boot from your new NVMe SSD.  Macrium's Rescue Media has a feature called ReDeploy that can tweak a Windows installation to address things like this, but unfortunately it's not included in the Free version.  So you would either need to get one of the paid versions, or else find some other workaround, although I don't know of any such workarounds.

Thanks @jphughan

I hope this can be the last question: what about a clean install?

Do you think can be go better? Actually the just windows consume 109gb no office, just dell and windows thinks