7 Posts
0
1128
December 4th, 2021 08:00
m17 R4, adding second SSD (970 EVO Plus 2TB)
I have a M17 R4 I bought new back in Aug this year. It came with a 1tb, PC SN730 NVMe WDC 1024GB. I ran out of storage a lot faster than I thought so after reading this forum and others I bought the Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD 2TB.
My question, is it worth cloning the original drive onto the 970 and making the 970 my boot drive, or just put the 970 in slot 2 and use it as storage? I researched some and it appears the 970 is a little faster than what I have. If I clone the OS to the 970, do I need to install it in slot 1 as the boot drive?
Any advice is appreciated,
Thanks for your time
No Events found!
JOcean
11 Legend
•
12.6K Posts
•
69.5K Points
1
December 4th, 2021 10:00
The Samsung is barely faster than the WD. The only advantage would be if you clone to the Samsung and install Samsung Magician then enable RAPID mode. RAPID mode uses some of the system RAM for a cache and increases read and write speed. But remember that it is using some of your system RAM and if you have less than 16 GB of RAM (8 GB total for example) it may slightly affect other performance.
Shown1964
7 Posts
0
December 4th, 2021 10:00
Thank you, I may just leave it as the secondary 'game' drive. I have no complaints about the drive it came with.
I have 32GB ram btw.
I contacted Dell about adding a drive and they wanted me to buy a 'Dell" NVMe M.2 gen4 2TB, OVER $500! They said they "can't recommend a third-party device as it's not tested with the system".
I see many Alienware users putting Samsung drives in, quite successfully. $500, smh...
JOcean
11 Legend
•
12.6K Posts
•
69.5K Points
1
December 9th, 2021 17:00
There are many good NVMe drives though Samsung seems to be one of the top requested in Dell systems. As mentioned I have always found WD Black to be excellent as well and of course Crucial.
Shown1964
7 Posts
0
December 17th, 2021 14:00
Finally got it installed, order a 2nd heat shield from ebay, got all my games on the new drive and it works great.
Only problem I had, I tried to install the Samsung driver and it couldn't detect the new SSD. After a bit of reading my bios was set to RAID, I had to switch to AHCI. Not straight forward as I had hoped, but I found THIS thread, and used this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ngnIKqPOc4&ab_channel=ChriSmith to successfully switch my BIOS from RAID to AHCI and install the correct driver. Thanks for everyone's help.