XPS 15 7590 Dual Drive Configuration

Finally looking to upgrade my XPS 15, however for me, internal storage capacity is a higher priority over battery. I'm trying to confirm if all models are capable of a dual drive setup with a smaller battery. Reading some of the manuals, there looks to be an option for a hard drive with the use of a smaller battery as with previous models, however the smaller battery is only available on the 9300H. Reps from Dell seem to state a dual drive not possible.

 

I’m not the expert but From what I saw it’s possible.... you can get the I7 but you will have to buy and swap in the smaller battery plus you will need the 2.5 bracket and ribbon cable

 

It's easy to tell which models come with the smaller battery, just look for the ones with the 56whr battery. That also means that sadly the higher end systems come with the larger battery so like Double 0 said, you'd have to buy the smaller battery and the bracket/cable.

 

wonder when you'll be able to purchase these components seperately

 

I don't think Dell ever offered the 56whr battery, the HDD cradle, the SATA cable for sale as retail parts for the essentially similar XPS 9550, 9560, 9570 models. Not sure why they would change.

If you search the forums, you can see some Chinese sources for parts that might have worked. Some people questioned if full SATA III speeds were available on that bus but I never saw any convincing data either way. It really didn't matter when people were throwing big HDDs in that slot.

If you are throwing in a big new SSD but it is crippled by say 3Gb/s bus, that would be irritating and bad allocation of $. If the bus indeed is that slow, a HDD might make more sense, although it will be a bit slower, noiser, and maybe power hungry; I couldn't get my stock 1TB SSD to stop whining in my 9550 so I just unplugged it.

Given low prices of nvme drives today, I think it makes sense to buy a big nvme drive and keep the big battery.

 

I have ridden my 1st Gen 9530 as long as I can and am now looking to upgrade. The biggest barrier I see is storage capacity. My 9530 has a 1tb msata and a 4gb 2.5 ssd. I own a media production company that does graphic design, photo and video, so there are always tons of huge files, templates and resources in play. I am having a hard time with the concept of constantly needing an external drive to function. I rarely run on battery so the idea of the smaller battery with a 2.5 slot seems close to ideal (ideal would have been a second msata slot like the Aero, IBM and others offer). Has anyone successfully gotten a 2nd drive into the 7590 yet? How did it perform?

 

I'll note both ports show up in the BIOS, but that doesn't mean much.

The Precision 5540 (Precision variant of the XPS 7590) allows for dual drives to be configured from the factory. Lots more options on that model, too.

 

I had a look at it and there are two weird config options:
1. Can't select 64GB RAM and 3-cell battery.
2. Can configure it with two 2.5 inch drives. That's an obvious error, just wondering what will they send if you order it like that.

 

I've done a dual drive config with an i5 XPS 15 7590 ordered with the small battery and it works perfectly. There's some significant mis-information in this thread. The laptop comes with an Nvme SSD which can be upgraded if desired (mine was from Hynix and I upgraded to a bigger Samsung 970 without any issues).

The 7590 with the small battery oddly comes with the mounting frame for the 2.5 inch drive bay but no proprietary SATA cable. The cable is the same as for earlier versions of the XPS 15 and this one on Amazon Prime for $11 works fine: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01B5DK24E/ If you want to save a few bucks and can wait weeks for it to arrive from China you can find the same cable cheaper on eBay.

And the person claiming you can't buy the smaller 56 watt hour batteries is also dead wrong. If you buy a higher-end 7590 with the big battery you should be able to "downgrade" to the smaller battery. You won't have the 2.5 inch drive frame but you can just use double sided foam tape to secure the drive along with the cable.

You simply pop in a 2.5 inch drive with the above cable and you're good to go. You can also easily dual boot into say Win10 and Linux from BIOS after adding the second drive.

As an aside, I can say the 7590 is a bit picky about RAM. Some Kingston 2666 DDR4 2x8GB RAM failed to boot while working perfectly in another Dell laptop. Mine came with dual 4GB Hynix 2666 modules.

And for those considering a 7590 don't get too excited about the i7 over the i5. The i5 still has 4 real cores and 8 virtual cores. It benchmarks at nearly 10,000 on Passmark which isn't far off the i7. And it also blissfully rarely has to spin the fans up. There are lots of complaints about the higher spec 7590's with nVidia graphics having frequent and obnoxious fan noise. You have to pick your poison. I'd rather give up a bit of performance for peace and quiet and longer battery life. In fact, the small battery with the i5 has been shown to outlast the big battery with an i7 and 4K display. And you can have two drives.

 

I don't see where this misinformation is though. No one said it didn't come with an NVMe drive, it was mentioned that you'd have to buy the cable (surprised it comes with the caddy though), and no one said you couldn't buy the 56whr battery (just difficult to do directly from Dell).

Thanks for listing the part number and also doing the testing.

 

Snap. I forgot my old MacBook Pro has all the hardware to run at full 6 Gbps which Apple advertised as a feature. On the other hand, Apple's firmware crippled the bus at 3Gbps. Regardless, running a SSD is a massive improvement over even a 7200rpm HDD. Obviously irritating to have the handicap but the SSD was absolutely worth the investment for speed; silence and battery life were added bonuses.

On the XPS YMMV.

I'll stand by this.​

 

You're mostly correct but some have given the impression you're better off giving up on a dual drive 7590 which is bad advice. Some have indicated the SATA drive might be slow when there's no evidence to back that up. If it's a conventional 5400 rpm drive, there's also little real world difference between 3 Gb/S and 6 Gb/S SATA. And others have indicated you're better off with just a really big nvme drive which is also not true for many use cases especially if you want to dual boot from BIOS or need a second 2TB+ drive without spending a fortune. There are many valid use cases for a dual drive XPS 15 but some in this thread seem to discourage it when it's perfectly workable and gives the XPS 15 a big advantage over some similar notebooks. It's also a plus the XPS 15 doesn't require major surgery to even open and doing so doesn't void the Dell warranty. That's not the case with Apple, HP, Asus, Acer, Lenovo, and many other thin laptops. So my point is users can take advantage of the XPS 15's flexible upgradability rather than being discouraged from doing so.

 

I know what you mean, but I’ve changed my mind. I was using XPS 9550 for 3 years or so, with small battery and biggest SSDs I could get my hands on. Once NVMe hit 2 TB I figured it doesn’t make sense to use SATA anymore so I started using a laptop with 2 m.2 slots. There is nothing above 2TB in NVMe form, btw I’m a big fan of QLC drives as secondary long term storage that sees mostly reads. I kind of need all the storage there is and don’t really care about battery life.

But there are 4TB SATA consumer drives now, hell, I have 7.8 TB Micron SSD. So I went back to NVMe +SATA. The cost of buying higher SKU, replacing battery and risk with not knowing whether any eBay/amazon small battery will actually work with this particular model steered me towards Razer Blade base instead of XPS, and I’m pretty happy. I have 9.8TB of storage with 64 GB of RAM in a small 15 incher that can hold 45+80W combined CPU+GPU power forever. The only problem is that 7.8 TB drive is enterprise, zero power management, I may downgrade to regular 4TB Samsung. It’s warm even at idle.

 

hahaha that is me.

A few people posted here that the extra SATA drive was slowed but I did not see any clear cut evidence one way or the other. Given all the performance shortcuts in the XPS, I am comfortable calling the SATA bay speeds uncertain until proven otherwise.

 

Having migrated my new 56Whr replacement battery and drive cradle from my Precision 5510, I can advise that it's not as simple as just getting the parts and dropping them into the chassis. The SSD is not the core issue, it's the battery. The XPS 15 7590 bios is not aware of the 56Whr charging profile and won't identify the battery since it's not part of a normal configuration for the 7590 builds. This is a major pain point. I looked around on various forums for run by Dell Certified support partners and there seems to be some guidance that when changing the factory battery size, that you should perform a bios reset. However, doing this in XPS 7590 is not as easy as it sounds. The bios software does not permit a proper Factory reset option, and the BIOS resent option only works on the specific value, not on the whole bios configuration. (the reset option has 3 modes, Factory/Bios/Custom but is specific to certain locations and context). My next action is to pull the motherboard out and to pull the actual button battery from the board for an extended bios clear/erase, before re-seating the new 56whr battery I purchased online.

My play B is to put the original 90+ Whr battery back and to use a 2TB M.2 SSD, however, I would really prefer to keep my existing 3TB combo (1 TB NVMe and 2TB SSD Sata), I don't really need the batter life as 80% of the time my laptop is tethered using the D3100 docking station I use, the times I need to move with it are limited and the life is only for 1-2 meetings. Sadly the effort required to make this happen as started to exceed the value.

 

Going to review my new 7590, got some questions.
Currently, I am using matebook x pro with dual monitor setup.

1st, does the 7590 support dual monitor? if so, what is the best connection method?
2nd, does it support 4k or 5k monitor? if so, what is the best setup?
3rd, I heard there is a dock you can buy for better cable management. Any recommend dock to buy for this laptop?
4th, What is the max numbers of monitor you can output for this notebook in 1080p or 4k or both?

Thanks.

 

The inside of a 7590 with the smaller battery

 

@spennis Do you still have this image? It's gone...

 

Has anyone succesfully replaced the larger battery with a smaller one? And added an extra HDD?
Or has anyone found a 2 TB M2 that works for the 7590?

 

Search the threads as there are people that did it with the 9550 and 9560 (and maybe 9570) which largely share the same chassis.