This post is more than 5 years old
1 Rookie
•
36 Posts
0
3300
August 2nd, 2016 09:00
Hard drive upgrade on Dell XPS-8900 Special Edition
Hello, I have a Dell XPS-8900 that I purchased a couple months ago and want to upgrade the hard drive. It has the 2TB 7200 rpm Hard Drive + 32GB M.2 SSD Cache. I noticed looking at the Disk Management, it has 2 free partitions; a 39 MB OEM Partition and a 11.73 GB Recovery Partition. Both show they are 100% free. I created the USB Recovery Drive and it deleted the files from the Recovery Partition.
Do I still need the Recovery Partition or the OEM Partition? When I upgrade to a new Hard Drive, can I just copy over the OS Partition?
Also, I thought it would have an EFI System Partition. Is this something I need or need to setup?
No Events found!
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
0
August 3rd, 2016 04:00
UEFI allows secure boot and for boot partitions over 2T in size -- those are the two major differences, along with the removal of the restriction for having four primary partitions per disc. Those may not matter here.
I don't think there's a capacity limit on the M.2 slot but there will likely be a limitation on the physical size of the card itself that may restrict your capacity.
You'll get the best performance out of the system by running the OS from a solid state drive, for certain. You can easily find 2.5" SATA SSDs that are reasonably priced up to 1T in size now. The 2.5" drives tend to be less expensive than the M.2 format drives, though excepting the NVMe drives (which are priced in the stratosphere), they're largely very reasonable in price.
I would not necessarily fear Toshiba's 3.5" drives - these are largely Hitachi/HGST designs (Toshiba entered the 3.5" drive market when WD took over HGST -- the Chinese government objected to the consolidation to just two US-based drive manufacturers and forced WD to spin off the plants making 3.5" drives to Toshiba). The HGST designs have a good reputation for reliability -- far better than those from Seagate, for sure.
You're probably better off with a straight out clone of the drive. You can use the Windows disc administrator to alter the partitions afterward. I've had good luck of late with Macrium Reflect (Free), but Acronis TrueImage works well -- and Samsung supplies a free version of it if you choose one of their SSDs.
TheRoots
1 Rookie
•
36 Posts
0
August 2nd, 2016 10:00
EJN63, Thanks for your reply.
Is there a benefit for running it in UEFI Mode? Or are there problems with switching it to UEFI Mode at this point? What would I have to do to put it in UEFI Mode and what would it change?
Also, if I installed a SSD does the mSATA become useless? Can I even install a SSD with the mSATA still in and put the OS on the SSD and move the Data files to a traditional HDD? Is it possible to upgrade the mSATA from 32gb to something larger as in 128gb or 256gb?
I am just looking at options to squeeze a little more performance out of my system. It seems a little slow in startup than what I expected.
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
1
August 2nd, 2016 10:00
If you're going to use the recovery drive, it'll restore the system to its as-shipped state.
It should have an EFI partition IF the system is running in UEFI mode. If it shipped in legacy mode, that won't be there.
The mSATA drive is a cache for the main drive - if you restore the system to a new drive, you'll need to set
ejn63
9 Legend
•
87.5K Posts
1
August 2nd, 2016 12:00
If the system is running in legacy (BIOS) mode -- check at powerup, F2 -- then to switch over to UEFI woudl require a ground-up reinstall - the hard drive needs to be repartitioned and then Windows needs to be reloaded ground-up.
Installing a native SSD will render the mSATA drive a moot point, yes.
I think the drive in these is M.2, not mSATA (i.e., NGFF 22 mm wide vs. the wider mSATA PCIe cards of the recent past). You should be able to replace the drive with a higher-capacity M.2 PCIe card in this model.
TheRoots
1 Rookie
•
36 Posts
0
August 2nd, 2016 19:00
EJN63, thanks for the information. Yes, it is in legacy mode and yes, it is an M.2 drive not mSATA.
What are the benefits to run in UEFI mode?
I have been debating between upgrading the Primary HDD to a WD Black 2tb drive and using the existing Toshiba 2tb drive as a Windows 10 File History drive. (I'm not very confident with the Toshiba drive.) Then I could add either the Samsung 850 EVO M.2 250GB SSD or the Samsung 950 PRO NVMe 256GB SSD. I read in another forum post that the limit for the XPS-8900 in the M.2 slot was 256GB.
My other option would be to convert to a Samsung 750 EVO Series 500GB 2.5" SSD for my OS and Apps and move my data to the Toshiba 2tb HDD.
I read about using AOMEI Partition Assistant Standard Edition. It said I would be able to copy only the partitions I wanted from one drive to another. So, I thought I would copy just the OS partition and leave the empty Recovery partitions.
I don't do any gamming, but use it for basic business applications MS-Office (including large Access databases) and heavy video/photo editing creation. If anyone has any thoughts on how I can tweak my system to improve it's startup and application load time, I would greatly appreciate your opinions.
Thanks in advance for your help.