XPS13 9350 - SSD upgrade help (clone SSD procedure)

I am interested in upgrading to a 500Gb SSD (from 256) but I am confused about the exact interface required for the SSD. I've previously only dealt with SATA SSDs and having searched a number of threads it seems that a Samsung 850 EVO would work(?).

Can anyone please what the interface types are i.e. what's the difference between M2 and PCIe (if any) and what version I actually need?

For example I've found an 850 here:

http://www.msy.com.au/viconline/pc-...500bw-500g-sataiii-ssd-solid-state-drive.html

but this states the interface is SATA. So I'm assuming this is not the correct drive?

Assuming I locate a suitable drive then previously when I've done this kind of procedure I just dropped the new SSD into an external USB (SATA) case and cloned the source drive. I presume I would need a new case that supports whatever interface is on the 850 to do this here? Any links please?

 

M.2 is a physical connector type. M.2 can either communicate with the computer over a
AHCI protocol (~0.5 GBps max throughput) or NVMe protocol. (~2.0GBps max throughput). The only things that matter regarding speed are which of the two protocols are being used.

SATA and PCIe are physical connections.
>> If a drive is M.2 SATA, then it must use the AHCI protocol.
>> If a drive is M.2 PCIe, it usually also means it connects via NVMe protocol. This is especially true if you're dealing with a drive manufactured in the past 2 months, like the Samsung SM951, PM951, or 950 Pro.
>> Sometimes, you'll find M.2 PCIe drives that use the AHCI protocol. Though this is more rare, and doesn't give the performance boost of an NVMe drive.

The wikipedia page for M.2 does a pretty good job explaining the difference. Especially with the diagram in the article (URL and image below).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.2




The easiest way to think about it is to think of them as two completely separate drive types..... M.2 AHCI nd M.2 NVMe. Except those two completely separate drive types just coincidentally happen to share a common physical connector plug shape (M.2)

As for cloning... Short answer is that it's faster and better to just reinstall windows.

Most cloning software hasn't been updated to support M.2 AHCI or M.2 NVMe. It's hard (if not impossible) to find adapters to convert M.2 SATA or M.2 PCIe to USB.

And finally, even if you hypothetically could find a way to clone the drive, you don't WANT to clone the drive. A factory imaged drive will contain bloatware, and will also have around 30GB set aside for Recovery partitions. You **intentionally** want a clean windows install to get rid of that bloatware, and to also reclaim any space taken up by that garbage Recovery partition.

A clean windows install (including installing the latest drivers) takes under an hour. The alternative of trying to clone two M.2 drives will take longer than an hour to even research, before you even got started doing anything.

Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

edit: Clarified difference between M.2 PCIe and M.2 NVMe. Similar, but there are a few edge cases where they are not equal. So I modified it to be ultra-accurate.

 

Thanks. I follow but you still didn't say which of the two M.2 variants is supported by the 9350 (or is it both?)

And I want to clone because it has taken many hours to install and configure all of my apps and settings. I've already removed the Dell bloatware manually. I
I'm happy with my config and just want more free space. Recreating from scratch will take a long time and that's assuming I don't miss a driver or install in the wrong order. As I say, I've done this many times before with plain old SATA SSDs.

I'm not sure about the issue with cloning software - surely the interface type is transparent? As long as the software has access to the physical characteristics at the OS level (cylinders, blocks etc) I'm not sure why the interface would matter? But I'm happy to be proved wrong!

 

Edit: Slight mistype in my previous post. I corrected it, in case anyone calls me out on not being ultra-accurate.

For the XPS 13, I don't think that anyone has actually TRIED an M.2 AHCI drive (why would they)? But the closest info I found was in a Reddit thread, that seems to indicate that yes, the XPS 13 9350 does indeed support M.2 NVMe (its default drive config), as well as M.2 AHCI if for some reason you want to put an M.2 AHCI drive in there.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/3rtpjo/xps_13_nvme_m2_ssd_support/cwrql3t

edit: It turns out that the XPS 13 9350 ships with a 128GB M.2 AHCI SSD. The 256GB / 512GB configurations use M.2 NVMe (Samsung SM951).

If this was a plain old SATA SSD, I would 100% completely agree with you, and it would be very easy to do so. But here's what you're dealing with if you *DO* choose to try and clone:

1) Find cloning software that is compatible with M.2 NVMe drives.
2) Create boot media for cloning software, with custom M.2 NVMe disk controller drivers slip-streamed in.
3) Create a Windows 10 Setup installer, on a USB Flash Drive (for use in step 10+)
4) Go into laptop BIOS. Turn Secure Boot = Off, Legacy Boot = On (also known as UEFI Boot = Off).
5) Boot into cloning software. Clone your existing 128GB drive onto an external USB 3.0 drive (since you won't want to buy a M.2 NVMe-to-USB adapter).
6) Physically swap / install your 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD.
7) Boot into cloning software. Clone your external USB 3.0 drive to the recently-installed 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD.
8) Delete the ~30GB Dell Recovery partition from there, and reclaim that space.
9) Resize your main partition to use all remaining space on the SSD.
10) Your computer will not boot at this point. Boot off of the Windows 10 Setup USB Drive.
11) Point Windows 10 Setup to your NVMe controller drivers, so it can locate the SSD.
12) Choose a Repair Windows Installation from Windows Setup. This will re-write / update the boot manager, to point to the correct boot partition identifiers.
13) Pray that this fixed the problem, and your laptop boots.
14) Pray that after all that, your new SSD is 4K cluster aligned. If it is *NOT* 4K cluser-aligned properly by either the cloning or partition resizing tool, then you're going to experience pretty significantly degraded read/write speed performance (about 20%-30% drop).

15) And even all of THAT works perfectly, you're still dealing with a Windows install that had bloatware removed, which is still going to be slower than a Windows install that never had bloatware to begin with.

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Your alternative is to just reinstall Windows from scratch, including applications and configurations:

1) Create a Windows 10 Setup installer, on a USB Flash Drive
2) Go into laptop BIOS. Turn Secure Boot = Off, Legacy Boot = On (also known as UEFI Boot = Off).
3) Physically swap / install your 512GB M.2 NVMe SSD.
4) Boot off of the Windows 10 Setup USB Drive.
5) Point Windows 10 Setup to your NVMe controller drivers, so it can locate the SSD.
6) Choose a New Windows Installation from Windows Setup, and point it to the bare unpartitioned space on your 512GB SSD. Windows will automatically create the proper partitions, make sure they are 4K cluster aligned, and create a valid boot loader configuration.
7) Re-install your drivers, apps, and configure your laptop appropriately.



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The main reason I suggest just doing a clean Windows install is for three reasons:

A) Time risk-management. Rebuilding your laptop from scratch will take a known amount of time (1,2,3,4,etc hours). If you try and clone, nobody knows how much time you're going to sink into troubleshooting, or whether you save any time at all.

B) Failure risk-management. This is a relatively complex disk cloning process. Most cloning tools don't support M.2 NVMe drives at all (even with proper disk controller drivers installed). 4K cluster alignment can be tricky, depending on the tool you use to clone and resize partitions. And you're going to be stuck with a slower Windows install, since you uninstalled bloatware (rather than started with a clean install).

And if anything goes wrong, there's a good chance you'll end up doing a laptop rebuild anyway, and wasting whatever time you already sunk into trying to do this via cloning.

C) It's fun. Call me a giant nerd. But I actually enjoy doing computer rebuilds on new hardware, just so I can see how much faster my new gear runs compared to my old gear. And a computer rebuild is about as processor and storage heavy as you can get as a way to "stretch the legs" of your new gear.

 

1) Macrium Reflect Free

 

What he said.

 

Thanks again for your extremely comprehensive reply. I have the 256GB so the Samsung NVME.

Now on the link I posted above for the EVO 850 it has detailed specs but no mention of M.2, AHCI or NVMe, so how can I tell what interface it is?

 

Thanks both, will check it out.

 

Samsung 8xx series only ever came as AHCI drives. If it's M.2 form factor, it's M.2 AHCI.

To my knowledge, the only drives out to buy right now at M.2 NVMe are Samsung 9xx series. Samsung SM951, or Samsung 950 Pro. The drive you have (256GB M.2 SSD that came with your XPS 13 9350) is a Samsung SM951.

 

Thanks again. This whole area seems to be a bit of a minefield. SATA was so much simpler!

 

I did a SSD Upgrade (on a XPS 12 9250 tablet) from the SATA to PCIe NVME Samsung 950 Pro using the System Image + Windows 10 install without an issue. One thing I did is that after the restore, it will not boot Windows 10 and I will do a "RESET" during recovery and have Windows 10 installed again on it's own with the default NVMe driver, it will work fine afterwards.

At last, downloaded the Samsung NVMe driver and speed goes back to normal (in my case only PCIe 2x since XPS 12 9250 supports 2x and not 4x)