How Hard is it - Installing SSD Drive in Alienware 17?

Hi,

I'm considering buying an Alienware 17 on a budget but I saw that it includes a 1 TB 5400rpm hard drive and not an SSD drive. I upgraded to SSD hard drives in my desktop awhile and have no desire to go back to a standard drive but I don't want to shell out $300 to pick the configuration that includes an SSD. I was thinking I could buy the Alienware 17 with the standard drive but buy an SSD along with it and upgrade it myself. My question is how hard is it to install an SSD in an Alienware 17? Do I just have to slide the old drive out and the SSD in or do I have to open the whole thing up and do major surgery?


Thanks

 

Easy.
Unscrew the two screws under bottom. And loosen and slide the bottom of the machine then you see the disk. Hd is attached with 4 screws so it is just pull the disk out.

 

Also remember there will be one slot open for easy addition of an ssd.

 

I did this a while back. I removed the original HHD and moved it to the open secondary HD slot and put my SSD in the primary HD slot. Works great! Just make sure you change the setting in BIOS to AHCI mode and you should be fine. Also if you do a clean install or a recovery install onto your SSD make sure only the SSD is connected to the motherboard. After installation you can reconnect your other HD. I'm using a Samsung 840 EVO 1TB SSD. It has already had 5.08 TB recorded since I bought it a year ago but I have done a lot of stress testing and multiple installs on the drive. It is still working like new. Also you will want to turn off your defrag and any sleep options for the SSD. There are other ways you can get the most out of your SSD but you can Google those and find out which ones you want to use.

 

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-prod...laptops/alienware-17_Owner's Manual_en-us.pdf

Page 21 will show you how it's done. It's honestly very easy

 

It's plug and play pretty much. We have a tech support channel on Youtube (Alienware Services) with some disassembly videos that you can use.

 

This, it's a great place to start learning, drives are fairly simple and the videos are pretty good.

 

Indeed.. 1st ever upgrade I did to a laptop was a hard drive one.. Its fairly simple even on the R4

 

Hi,

Since it was mentioned I'd like to say that I do not agree with changing the drive access mode to AHCI. All it does is remove the RAID bios from startup (2 second saving?) and a tiny overhead measured in milliseconds, only identifiable in benchmarks. The SSD OEM's advise this for a simple reason, they want their drive to give the best benchmark numbers. When in reality, load times are undetectable between the two modes. If you're chasing benchmark numbers then by all means go for it, for a gaming, general purpose machine it is not needed.

Downsides/upsides

By turning off the RAID bios you will mess up a machine that has a caching drive. It no longer works.

If you wanted to add a caching drive (in the msata slot) to speed up a HDD then you will almost certainly need to re-install windows as it will fail to start after you turn RAID back on.

Even if you never intend to use RAID you're limiting your future options. When that cheap 1tb SSD comes along how sweet to pair it up as a single 2tb drive .

I recommend a simpler method of upgrading.

Leave the original boot device in bay 0 and put the SSD in the spare slot. Change the boot order in the bios. Boot to DVD install and select the new drive. There is no downside to this and for anyone watching that has a cache drive it will continue to work caching the original HDD and not need and attention . Also you have a simple software rollback if there are problems. Put boot order back and the machine will start on the original installation.

From what I read, if you're going win 8 then turn off fastboot/secure boot, you don't need it (for speed) and it does some strange things on the boot drive that could mess with changing the boot order - not too sure about the details of this - only other's experiences I read here

Good luck HTH.