XPS 13 9360, SSD upgrade options please

Question

Hi, I was planning to upgrade the existing 250GB Samsung PM961 SSD on my DELL XPS13 9360 to a better one to give me atleast 500GBs and possibly better speeds. Does any of you have any recommendations for which M.2 SSD shall i go for? (the existing one is already a NVMe so i am looking for a similar sort)

jphughan · Accepted Answer

@GaneshAcharya wrote:Thanks for the information. Meanwhile i am tying to find out if buying a SSD which perform at 4 lanes pcie will do me any good in this model of XPS. as i heard in 1 of the other forums that this model has only 2 lanes! Is this correct? Meaning even though a samsung 960 evo can perform at 4000 it will max out at 1800 in this model. if this is correct then my question is do you know which is the best ssd for 2 lanes pcie? Looks like you wrote this while I was writing my own reply above. I don’t know of any NVMe SSDs specifically designed for an x2 PCIe interface, but I would recommend against buying one even if you found it, because if the system still runs that interface at half speed, then you’ll end up with effectively x1 performance in that situation. There are also other great reasons to like Samsung SSDs even if you can’t use all of their performance, and I don’t think Samsung ever made an NVMe SSD that didn’t significantly exceed that system’s limitations. Their first NVMe SSD was the 950 Pro. So again I would recommend getting the 960 Evo. It’s known to work in the XPS 13.

JOcean · Answer

You can go up to a 1 TB NVME/PCIe SSD. As for a brand, there are many good ones to try. You have a Samsung now and if you are happy with the performance then stick with Samsung. Or if you want to keep the cost down try Crucial, or Adata.

GaneshAcharya · Answer

Thanks for the information. Meanwhile i am tying to find out if buying a SSD which perform at 4 lanes pcie will do me any good in this model of XPS. as i heard in 1 of the other forums that this model has only 2 lanes! Is this correct? Meaning even though a samsung 960 evo can perform at 4000 it will max out at 1800 in this model. if this is correct then my question is do you know which is the best ssd for 2 lanes pcie?

jphughan · Answer

The PM961 is basically Samsung’s OEM version of the 960 Evo. I agree with JOcean’s general recommendation of Samsung SSDs, but there are multiple reports of the 970 Evo not working in some Dell systems, including XPS 13 systems, even though the older 960 Evo works just fine. I’m not sure about the 970 Pro. I would recommend trying to get a 960 Evo in the desired capacity. The performance difference of the 970 series isn’t significant, and actually the XPS 13 9350 and 9360 have a firmware limitation that will prevent even older SSDs like 960 Evo and the one you already have from running at max performance. Basically, although those XPS 13 models have an x4 PCIe interface, they run that interface in power saving GT2 mode rather than max performance GT4 mode, which is basically the same thing as running an x2 interface in max performance mode. The end result is that you’ll never see performance above roughly 1.8 GB/s, and even the older 960 Evo can do above 3 GB/s, so there’s no point spending more on something faster. Even your current SSD would probably perform much faster in a different system.

abad467 · Answer

GaneshAcharya, which SSD did you go with? I am also looking to upgrade my SSD in my XPS 13 9360.

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XPS 13 9360, SSD upgrade options please

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