I just completed an upgrade of my Dell XPS 13 9370. I have the i7 model with 16GB memory and 512GB SSD Toshiba KXG50ZNV512G. I bought it at Costco and it was a good deal. I wanted to get the 1TB model, however this was available. Anyway - I upgraded the SSD (replaced it) with a 2 Terabyte Toshiba KXG50PNV2T04. The reason I chose the Toshiba is that I wanted to keep the same name brand (I assume Dell put a lot of effort in to choosing the Toshiba KXG50 series) and wanted to limit the amount of differences. I had a look at the Samsung Evo 970 however decided to go with the Toshiba for the previous reasons.
The process of actually cloning the original drive with the new drive was a difficult process. I bought an external Toshiba Canvio 3TB harddrive which I used as the destination for the cloning of the original Toshiba 512GB SSD. I tried three different softwares to try the cloning. These include EaseUS Todo and AOMEI Backupper (which both failed miserably giving errors that did not make sense such as "not enough unallocated space on destination drive" etc.). In the end, the only solution that worked for me was Macrium Reflect which successfully cloned the Toshiba 512 GB drive to the external Toshiba Canvio 3TB drive. I tested the drive on an Alienware 15" and it successfully booted into the clone environment. Remember to press F12 at boot so you can select the drive to boot from.
However - when I tried boot from the external clone on the XPS, it failed to boot and kept rebooting. I then decided to make a bootable rescue disk on a USB disk with Macrium Reflect. This worked fine when I booted and I examined the options with the rescue disk and it included the ability to see attached devices, redeploy drives to new hardware, as well as cloning from drive to drive.
I decided then to go ahead with the operation of pulling apart the Dell XPS13 as per Service Manual (https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/xps-13-9370-laptop_service-manual_en-us.pdf). This went ahead nicely and once reassembled, I restarted the computer with the Rescue Disk USB stick as the bootable drive. Once in there, I saw that the Dell acknowledge the 2TB Toshiba SSD drive and also saw the external USB Canvio drive with the clone of my original 512GB Toshiba SSD. So I cloned that to the 2TB disk using the Rescue Disk options.
I went into the Bios, restored the settings to what they were previously (there are three choices, Custom, Factory, and another which I can't recall). I chose the later.
Bootup was successful and the machine was working flawlessly. I did some benchmarks to make sure the SSD was functioning at the speed it should and was getting the speeds of over 1000MBs which was fine. I used userbenchmark.com to do that testing.
So overall - bit tedious and tricky, particularly with the cloning software. However, worked fine in the end!
Last tip: I have a Sonet eGPU which acts as an external graphics card and power to the XPS. Remove that cable as the BIOS with the changed settings to allow USB booting did not like that device. Not a problem but just a tip. Just disconnect everything you do not need to get this working until it is working!
Hope this helps people in the future. I am now happy to have an XPS 13 maxed out with a 2TB SSD drive :-)
@p0r0, you could have saved yourself a lot of effort if you hadn’t tried to boot from the clone target while it was installed externally. If the external interface used USB, then full Windows doesn’t support booting from USB anyway due to a limitation imposed by Microsoft. Also, why would you have CLONED onto an external hard drive that you had no intention of ever using as a boot drive? The sensible way to do it would have been to capture your source drive as an image file on that external hard drive, then install the new SSD internally, and then restore it onto the new SSD. Image operations are far better for this purpose, because just store a file on the external drive rather than making a mess of partitions, they allow other data on the drive to be preserved if the user has any, and they tend to complete more quickly because images use compression, and since the write speed of the destination is typically the bottleneck having less raw data to write means the operation completes faster. The only way a clone would have made more sense would've been if you had some sort of adapter to have both the source and final destination SSD connected simultaneously, in which case yes that makes more sense because you can do the whole thing as a single operation rather than an image capture and then an image restore.
Dell uses both Toshiba and Samsung, and owners have typically found that Samsung units perform better. In fact for one particular Toshiba generation there are several very long threads here about very slow write speeds on Toshiba SSDs, found often in the Inspiron 7577. But maybe that’s been fixed.
There are more reasons than just performance to buy the 970. Cheap SSDs are built with lower-grade chips, and will almost certainly have a shorter lifespan than the 970s, which are built with top-notch chips.
Cheap SSDs generally come with a 1-year warranty. Samsung's retail SSDs come with five years. That gives you some idea of what the manufacturer is willing to back with its money.
Remember, SSDs have finite lifespans - memory cells have a finite number of read-write cycles. And there's a big difference at the chip level between a $150 SSD and a $250-300 SSD - and not just in speed alone.
I have an XPS 13 that came with a 128 GB SATA III SSD, and recently installed a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD. The upgrade was a piece of cake, if you have the right hardware and software. In a nutshell, I installed the Samsung in a USB-C to PCIE adapter, then simply cloned my OS in the Dell to the external SSD using Macrium Reflect free edition. Replaced the original SSD in the XPS with the new one and it booted up fine without having to mess with anything in the BIOS.
I did have to expand the partitions in the Samsung since what cloned over was essentially a 128 GB OS, but I used MiniPartition Manager software to do that, which took 15 seconds to complete within Windows. While Reflect has the capability to do this during the clone it's a bit more complicated so I passed on doing it that way.
If your computer only has one M2. PCIE slot (like most laptops) than an adapter like this makes cloning your OS and upgrading your SSDs a breeze.
A major disappointment for me was finding out the PCIE controller on the Dell XPSs are limited to 1800/1800 read/write due to hardware limitations; I should have checked this forum first. Therefore if you are shopping for an NVME SSD, don't bother spending extra bucks on anything running over that. Some of the cheaper, older SSDs run around 2500/1300 or 1800/1800 so that is the way to go.
I personally think there is an inherent performance issue with the PCIE controllers on the XPS, to wit: I don't see any overall increase in system performance going from 500/500 R/W on the SATA SSD to even 1800/1800 on the neutered Samsung, so if you really want to save money, just put in another SATA SSD. You can get a 1 TB SATA SSD for as cheap as $170 on Newegg versus $280 for a 1 TB NVME SSD like my 970 EVO, as prices have dropped a lot on the 'older', non-pro model Samsungs. Yeah, the SATA SSD is rated at 500/500 R/W versus 3400/2500 on my 970 EVO but look at what I ended up with :Crying:. Forget about CrystalMark bragging rights on the current XPS platform.
ejn63
10 Elder
•
30.7K Posts
1
April 30th, 2018 06:00
These all have one M.2 slot for a 2280 SSD - either NVMe or SATA.
p0r0
1 Message
1
October 20th, 2018 19:00
I just completed an upgrade of my Dell XPS 13 9370. I have the i7 model with 16GB memory and 512GB SSD Toshiba KXG50ZNV512G. I bought it at Costco and it was a good deal. I wanted to get the 1TB model, however this was available. Anyway - I upgraded the SSD (replaced it) with a 2 Terabyte Toshiba KXG50PNV2T04. The reason I chose the Toshiba is that I wanted to keep the same name brand (I assume Dell put a lot of effort in to choosing the Toshiba KXG50 series) and wanted to limit the amount of differences. I had a look at the Samsung Evo 970 however decided to go with the Toshiba for the previous reasons.
The process of actually cloning the original drive with the new drive was a difficult process. I bought an external Toshiba Canvio 3TB harddrive which I used as the destination for the cloning of the original Toshiba 512GB SSD. I tried three different softwares to try the cloning. These include EaseUS Todo and AOMEI Backupper (which both failed miserably giving errors that did not make sense such as "not enough unallocated space on destination drive" etc.). In the end, the only solution that worked for me was Macrium Reflect which successfully cloned the Toshiba 512 GB drive to the external Toshiba Canvio 3TB drive. I tested the drive on an Alienware 15" and it successfully booted into the clone environment. Remember to press F12 at boot so you can select the drive to boot from.
One thing to remember is that you need to update the settings in the Bios for the XPS to support Thunderbolt / USB-C at boot and legacy boot sequences etc. This link gives you the instructions. https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln301218/how-to-boot-to-an-external-device-using-usb-type-c-connection?lang=en
However - when I tried boot from the external clone on the XPS, it failed to boot and kept rebooting. I then decided to make a bootable rescue disk on a USB disk with Macrium Reflect. This worked fine when I booted and I examined the options with the rescue disk and it included the ability to see attached devices, redeploy drives to new hardware, as well as cloning from drive to drive.
I decided then to go ahead with the operation of pulling apart the Dell XPS13 as per Service Manual (https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/xps-13-9370-laptop_service-manual_en-us.pdf). This went ahead nicely and once reassembled, I restarted the computer with the Rescue Disk USB stick as the bootable drive. Once in there, I saw that the Dell acknowledge the 2TB Toshiba SSD drive and also saw the external USB Canvio drive with the clone of my original 512GB Toshiba SSD. So I cloned that to the 2TB disk using the Rescue Disk options.
I went into the Bios, restored the settings to what they were previously (there are three choices, Custom, Factory, and another which I can't recall). I chose the later.
Bootup was successful and the machine was working flawlessly. I did some benchmarks to make sure the SSD was functioning at the speed it should and was getting the speeds of over 1000MBs which was fine. I used userbenchmark.com to do that testing.
So overall - bit tedious and tricky, particularly with the cloning software. However, worked fine in the end!
Last tip: I have a Sonet eGPU which acts as an external graphics card and power to the XPS. Remove that cable as the BIOS with the changed settings to allow USB booting did not like that device. Not a problem but just a tip. Just disconnect everything you do not need to get this working until it is working!
Hope this helps people in the future. I am now happy to have an XPS 13 maxed out with a 2TB SSD drive :-)
p0r0
PS - naturally do this at your own risk!
jphughan
9 Legend
•
14K Posts
1
October 21st, 2018 07:00
@p0r0, you could have saved yourself a lot of effort if you hadn’t tried to boot from the clone target while it was installed externally. If the external interface used USB, then full Windows doesn’t support booting from USB anyway due to a limitation imposed by Microsoft. Also, why would you have CLONED onto an external hard drive that you had no intention of ever using as a boot drive? The sensible way to do it would have been to capture your source drive as an image file on that external hard drive, then install the new SSD internally, and then restore it onto the new SSD. Image operations are far better for this purpose, because just store a file on the external drive rather than making a mess of partitions, they allow other data on the drive to be preserved if the user has any, and they tend to complete more quickly because images use compression, and since the write speed of the destination is typically the bottleneck having less raw data to write means the operation completes faster. The only way a clone would have made more sense would've been if you had some sort of adapter to have both the source and final destination SSD connected simultaneously, in which case yes that makes more sense because you can do the whole thing as a single operation rather than an image capture and then an image restore.
Dell uses both Toshiba and Samsung, and owners have typically found that Samsung units perform better. In fact for one particular Toshiba generation there are several very long threads here about very slow write speeds on Toshiba SSDs, found often in the Inspiron 7577. But maybe that’s been fixed.
ejn63
10 Elder
•
30.7K Posts
1
November 1st, 2018 06:00
There are more reasons than just performance to buy the 970. Cheap SSDs are built with lower-grade chips, and will almost certainly have a shorter lifespan than the 970s, which are built with top-notch chips.
Cheap SSDs generally come with a 1-year warranty. Samsung's retail SSDs come with five years. That gives you some idea of what the manufacturer is willing to back with its money.
Remember, SSDs have finite lifespans - memory cells have a finite number of read-write cycles. And there's a big difference at the chip level between a $150 SSD and a $250-300 SSD - and not just in speed alone.
Clevor
1 Rookie
•
68 Posts
0
November 1st, 2018 06:00
I have an XPS 13 that came with a 128 GB SATA III SSD, and recently installed a 1 TB Samsung 970 EVO NVME SSD. The upgrade was a piece of cake, if you have the right hardware and software. In a nutshell, I installed the Samsung in a USB-C to PCIE adapter, then simply cloned my OS in the Dell to the external SSD using Macrium Reflect free edition. Replaced the original SSD in the XPS with the new one and it booted up fine without having to mess with anything in the BIOS.
I did have to expand the partitions in the Samsung since what cloned over was essentially a 128 GB OS, but I used MiniPartition Manager software to do that, which took 15 seconds to complete within Windows. While Reflect has the capability to do this during the clone it's a bit more complicated so I passed on doing it that way.
This is the USB-C to PCIE adapter I used:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07GXJ678P/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o05_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
If your computer only has one M2. PCIE slot (like most laptops) than an adapter like this makes cloning your OS and upgrading your SSDs a breeze.
A major disappointment for me was finding out the PCIE controller on the Dell XPSs are limited to 1800/1800 read/write due to hardware limitations; I should have checked this forum first. Therefore if you are shopping for an NVME SSD, don't bother spending extra bucks on anything running over that. Some of the cheaper, older SSDs run around 2500/1300 or 1800/1800 so that is the way to go.
I personally think there is an inherent performance issue with the PCIE controllers on the XPS, to wit: I don't see any overall increase in system performance going from 500/500 R/W on the SATA SSD to even 1800/1800 on the neutered Samsung, so if you really want to save money, just put in another SATA SSD. You can get a 1 TB SATA SSD for as cheap as $170 on Newegg versus $280 for a 1 TB NVME SSD like my 970 EVO, as prices have dropped a lot on the 'older', non-pro model Samsungs. Yeah, the SATA SSD is rated at 500/500 R/W versus 3400/2500 on my 970 EVO but look at what I ended up with :Crying:. Forget about CrystalMark bragging rights on the current XPS platform.