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XPS 13 9360 - drive enclosure for cloning
All,
I am not trying to clone my drive, but that title seemed most likely to draw the attention I need and it may help someone that DOES want to clone their drive.
Last year my XPS 9360 started behaving much like the post in this thread "XPS 13 9360 freezes and shows "Hard Drive not installed". I don't know who locks these pages when there is plainly an open question at the end, but I will save that discussion for elsewhere.
Because I could find no solution to my problem and needing to get back up and running quickly, I simply bought a new Dell XPS 9360. I was able to boot the old one up a couple of times and get much of my data copied to a USB drive, but I still occasionally discover that something is still missing and I would like to retrieve it from the drive in that failed computer. That other essentially dead XPS 13 has sat there ever since, just taunting me to pull the internal drive out of it, place it into an external drive enclosure and get whatever data I want when I want it. The problem? I have bought two drive enclosures and neither of them worked. Please don't ask me what that means because it is irrelevant. What I need to know is this - Specifically what make and model of drive enclosure do I need for the factory installed internal M.2 SSD? Thanks! - Phillip
Update: I opened the computer up again and took a picture of the drive label. It is an NVMe drive and those enclosures must not have been available in early 2018. Now they are, albeit at $40-50 compared to the $8-12 for the other styles of drive. If they all have NVMe drives, great. If someone with any expertise knows if any are not, please pipe up. Otherwise, what people need should be an NVMe external enclosure.
jphughan
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January 22nd, 2019 15:00
It depends on whether your M.2 SSD is M.2 SATA or M.2 NVMe. I believe Dell only used M.2 SATA for 128GB SSDs, and all higher capacities used NVMe. If it's an M.2 SATA SSD, then there are a variety of options on the market, although the easiest setup would probably be a SATA to USB adapter and then an M.2 SATA to regular SATA bridge board that you'd plug into it. If it's an M.2 NVMe SSD, the problem there is that NVMe to USB is still very new technology. I haven't seen any adapters like that on the market from well known and respected brands (like StarTech), and the ones that ARE on the market have pretty bad reviews. I just asked StarTech about this and they replied that they're still working on it because they haven't gotten it quite right yet. There are NVMe to Thunderbolt 3 adapters and enclosures you technically could use since your system has Thunderbolt 3, and they'd be much faster because they would allow your NVMe SSD to run over PCIe as it's designed to do rather than getting bottlenecked by USB, but those are very expensive.
If you just need to migrate data, you'd be much better off with a two-step process of capturing a full disk image of your source SSD to a file that you'd "park" on a typical external hard drive or something, then restoring that image to the target. The end result is exactly the same as a direct clone; the only difference is the intermediate step of "parking" your data as an image file on an external hard drive.
Skyking69
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January 22nd, 2019 16:00
jphughan,
Much thanks. I actually posted an update before seeing your reply. In fact it is an NVMe drive. And the enclosures are very specific to which M.2 drive you are using. I also suspect that when I first went looking few options for external enclosures existed.
Your advice will be carefully considered. If I can get the data off this drive my intent is to dump it to my NAS, then I'll probably just clone the drive in the operational computer and see if the dead one comes to life. There are lots of opinions about running utilities and the likes, but the symptoms mine manifested and the reality of my time constraints did not afford me hours of time troubleshooting. Backing up is good, but you have to have something to use it with..
Anyway, thanks, hopefully some others get some benefit from this thread.
jphughan
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January 22nd, 2019 16:00
Happy to help! Yeah, what few options there are on the market are all new. The reason I emailed StarTech is that I work in IT and therefore routinely need adapters like this, so I asked them if they had any plans to offer a single USB adapter that could accept M.2 SATA, M.2 NVMe, mSATA, and "regular" SATA drives, since I really don't want to own and carry 4 adapters to cover all of my bases. They agreed that it sounded appealing and there would be a market for it among IT pros, but the main sticking point is NVMe to USB at the moment. There's also an issue about M.2 slot keying. M.2 slots can either be B-key or M-key. M.2 SSDs can be either B-key, M-key, and B+M-key (which fits into either slot type). M.2 SATA SSDs are typically B+M keyed, and most M.2 NVMe are typically M-keyed because that's required for PCIe x4 support. However, there are some M.2 NVMe SSDs that only support PCIe x2, and those are B-keyed -- and those don't fit into the much more common M-key slot type. So even a "universal" adapter might not be able to be fully universal, and of course it makes the adapter and enclosure situation that much more interesting.