XPS 17 9700 SSD UPGRADE CHOICE AND CONFIG?

New member here after just ordering the XPS 17 direct from dell (i7,16gb, FHD, 512gb SSD). Painfully expensive but i'm excited!

I would like to install a secondary 1tb SSD and i am hoping for some advice before i purchase one.

I've heard the 970 EVO PLUS is exceptional although gets hot? I can also get the Crucial P1 at a good price point. (Please bare in mind i am a relative novice in relation to computer components)

Are there any SSD's that you reccomend?

My use case is pretty standard if not basic. Pretty big home photo and video libary, intense browser usage, word/excel for work, FM 20 for leisure etc

I am going to do a clean installation of Windows when it arrives, should i opt to install on the new 'faster' 1tb SSD? What is the best arrangement for my two drives in regards to which one has the operating system, photos/videos, FM 20 applications and data etc etc

Any advice warmly recieved, in fact any advice of what to do/look out for on the arrival of the new machine would be great.

Cheers

 

@Spartan@HIDevolution knows the best drive to use. Just as fast as the Samsung but more reliable and quite a bit cheaper.

 

HP EX950 is the best bang for the buck! superb performance, consistent speeds, doesn't overheat! I'd take that any day of the week over ANY Samsung SSD no matter what synthetic benchmarks tell you (or lie to you I may say)

 

Exactly on the benchmarks. They prove NOTHING. Everyone harps on benchmark speeds etc. They prove nothing in real world performance. I had a back and forth with a guy on a photography website I frequent regarding the terrible performance of the new macbook pro 16 for video and photo editing. He kept bringing up benchmarks, I kept telling him benchmarks prove NOTHING. The surface book 3 Mops the Mbp 16 in real world performance. That set off the apple hater alarms. Obviously I am not since I use iphone and Ipad regularly. I have a hard time moving away from my iphone since it provides things android does not for my family. Iphones are smoother than any android I have ever used as well. My ipad is a different story. It's been buggy as of recent. I am hoping that moving to ios 14 will fix that. But I think I am going to get the new surface pro X mk2 when it arrives. That device just makes more sense for me on a professional level.

 

A factory reset can do wonders to your old device especially on a completely new OS

 

Already done and made no difference. I use my galaxy tab a 8 more than my iPad now.

 

Thanks, thats a good enough reccomendation for me! i'll grab one!
do you reckon i should install windows onto the existing ssd or the EX950? are there any pros/cons to either?
looking for any advice to follow for wehn my XPS turns up next week.

Cheers

 

I recommend cloning your current SSD to the new one using Macrium Reflect, setting it as the boot device, then wiping the original SSD and use it for data storage

OR

Clean install:

Windows 10 Clean Installation Guide

OR, you can do a clean install plus automatically have all the drivers installed using the Dell OS Recovery

Make sure to right click on the file(s) you just downloaded, go to Properties, then hit Unblock from the bottom right as it may be blocked since it was downloaded from the internet, if you don't do this before you run the file or extract it, then it may not install correctly.

To prevent this automatic blocking of files in the future so you don't have to go unblocking every file you download to ensure it runs properly, follow the guide in this thread:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/are-you-sure-you-want-to-run-this-file-yes-or-no.825668/

 

Great tweak for preventing blocking of files, thanks!

In essence both ssd's will be blank as it will be a new machine and i plan on doing a clean installtion. Do you recommend installing windows on the EX950 because it will give me a performance boost over the stock XPS ssd?

I originally thought it would be best to do what youre suggesting (and still do) but i have seen a few comments mentioning installing it on the stock ssd so that the EX950 would last longer?

I've also had people tell me to setup RAID 1 on them, install all my heavy programs/games on the faster drive, partition the 1tb into 2 drives to effectively make 3 drives etc etc etc

As i mentioned before, i'm a bit of a novice so just trying to nail down whats best.

Cheers

 

I would set up the new ssd as boot and os and use the included drive as storage. Just me however.

 

It depends. The 4KB random read/write is more important for day to day tasks for an OS disk. High impressive sequential speed won't help much if the new and shiny do it worse in the most important OS tasks. I would test out both ssd if you don't already know how they perform vs each other. New or fancy doesn't always mean better. Again, all depends on how you'll use your computers/ssd's.

Yooo belive in that new and shiny has to be better? Or is is because you know Dell don't always put in good enough disks?

 

Well my taptop came with a WD SN730 so Dell not always puts slow / bad drives

 

Then why say he should use the new and shiny as OS disk? I prerfer to #know what will work best# before I make final decisions