XPS 15 9550, Compatible M.2 SSD?

Sorry, could of notes I forgot to add to my post above: If you want hardware encryption because you're concerned about performance, CPUs starting from several years ago now have specific instructions to accelerate AES encryption/decryption; Intel calls this feature AES-NI.  The result is that there is no performance penalty from using software (CPU-based) encryption compared to hardware encryption, even when reading/writing data at speeds that modern NVMe SSDs use.  The only way to get hardware encryption on these systems would be to either downgrade to a SATA-based SSD, which will absolutely impose a major performance hit since SATA is nowhere near as fast as NVMe SSDs like your Samsung unit, or else to activate the SSD's hardware encryption using TCG/OPAL, but the products that use those tend to be enterpise-level, not something you'd buy for a single system, and having administered products that use those, they create massive headaches for IT administrators and users.  Apparently there's also a hardware-accelerated version of BitLocker called eDrive, but that's a pain to get enabled as well and I have yet to see any mechanism for performing a secure erase of the drive later.  Microsoft tells users to check with their drive manufacturer, and the drive manufacturers say to check with Microsoft.

Hello!  Is your M.2 drive NVMe or SATA?  If its NVMe there is no drive level boot passwords.  As for encryption that would I think be via Windows 10 itself but don't quote me on that as I haven't played with encryption.  If it is a SATA m.2, Samsung drives should be the most compatible.  Have you updated your BIOS?

Dell has a KB article that basically says, "Our systems do not support setting HDD passwords on NVMe drives," so it has nothing to do with the SSD itself, and unless that policy has changed recently and been retrofitted to the XPS 15 9550, updating your BIOS isn't going to do anything.  If you have Windows 10 Pro, you can look at BitLocker, which I strongly advise over hardware encryption for several reasons anyway.  If not, you can try VeraCrypt, which is built from te very popular TrueCrypt and now supports system partition encryption on Windows 10 UEFI systems.  I used TrueCrypt back in the Windows 7 days and had no issues with it, but I haven't used VeraCrypt on newer systems because I moved to BitLocker.

Problem solved then - I'll stick with the 960 EVO M.2 NVMe using LUKS LVM encryption.  I confess like you I prefer software encryption anyway, I feel (rightly or wrongly) that I have more control over it that way.  Many thanks for your help!

Thanks for the extensive and helpful reply!  I'm using linux so can install with an LVM and full disk encryption at software level.  Does the XPS 9550 have the capacity to use the full NVMe bandwidth and, if so, will it therefore be faster to use this with software encryption than a SATA M.2 SSD with hardware encryption?

You're definitely right about having more control, and that's a main reason I use software encryption myself.  When I worked in IT at a company that used TCG/OPAL hardware encryption, that solution didn't have a way to secure erase the drive and return it to unencrypted status, nor was it possible to erase the drive while it was encrypted in order to reimage it, so our policy ended up being that drives using TCG/OPAL had to be considered single-use, i.e. you had to throw the drive away and replace it when you wanted to reimage/repurpose the system -- which was obviously wasteful.  And Class 0 encryption, which is based on the HDD password, makes data recovery through an external device impossible.  I have a friend right now who has an mSATA SSD in a system that has a dead motherboard, and ordinarily he could just connect that to a SATA to USB adapter (plus an mSATA to SATA adapter, which is cheap and easy to find) and access his data from another PC that way -- but because he enabled the HDD password, he has to find another system that has an mSATA slot and install it into that system internally so that the system can prompt for the password.  He's now using BitLocker on his new system to avoid ending up in that position again.  That said, external recovery of NVMe SSDs is complicated right now anyway because the only available external NVMe interface is an external Thunderbolt-based NVMe enclosure, and those are a lot more expensive than SATA to USB adapters, but having a password definitely wouldn't make things easier, especially given that some systems like Dell's don't even support prompting for an HDD password when the NVMe SSD is installed even internally!

Sorry to inject myself here, but on this topic, to be very clear, I can take out my 512GB NVMe drive that came with the XPS 9550 and replace it with a M.2 Sata drive, there will be no issues and keying of the notch will be to the right, to accommodate NVMe or SSD (EVO 860 1TB)? Is their a BIOS setting too to set btwn PCIe and Sata?

The reason I ask is, it's because it's nearly impossible to get a 56wh battery to replace my 86wh battery so I can get extra space to put in a SSD 2.5 drive in the drive bay that is being blocked by the battery. I would have got the Precision 5510 that has it, but it's way too much more for the same hardware. So in essence, to go from 512GB NVMe to 1TB, I'd either need to replace the 512GB NVMe drive with a more affordable M.2 Sata drive if that would work or hope and pray Dell sells the following so I can keep everything as is and just replace the battery and buy the drive cage/cable/interposer and add in an additional 1TB 2.5 SSD:

1. The Isolator (ribbon cable) P\N #XDYGX

2. The Interposer (data connector P/N #3XYT5

1A/2A: Set of above 3FDY3

3. Dell 56wh battery RRCGW/M7R96

You'll sacrifice a lot of usability for the sake of the 2.5" drive - you'll cut the battery runtime just about in half, and lose quite a bit in performance by downgrading from NVMe to SATA.

Whatever your need for larger storage capacity, can it be met by using high capacity external 2.5" drive - hard drive or SSD?  That would compromise the system not at all - whereas you're going to take a huge hit all around for the sake of the internal 2.5" drive.

A Samsung T3 external SSD is about $350 for 1T -- by the time you buy the battery and other parts, you'll spend far more than for the internal components.

Thanks, but I rarely use the battery. With my M4400 I bought in 2009, I may have used it on battery twice, the same situation would be applicable for the 9550. The cost of the battery/cables would be ~$150 and would allow me to keep my NVMe and also add in additional storage on the 2.5 internal for my VMs, without connected USB cords. (I have 10 4TB Seagate drives for storage) But switching the NVMe for Sata could work too and for speeds, I really don't notice any difference between NVMe (XPS 9550 with Win 8.1 -- ditched Win10) and SSD (M4400 has a 850 EVO with Win 8.1), even when working on VMs, so that is not a real world concern for me, more of a spec. A car going 560 MPH vs 2300MPH makes no real difference when just driving down a block or two.

I own a xps 15 9550 with a 250g ssd way to small, my shame.  I would like to replace it with the

Samsung 970 EVO SSD 1TB - M.2 NVMe.  Will this work for my machine.  Not a real geek so not sure about how this goes.