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1 Rookie
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45 Posts
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3710
August 2nd, 2016 19:00
Upgrades for the LITEON M.2 32GB SSD on a Dell XPS-8900 Special Edition.
Has anyone successfully upgraded the M.2 SSD Cache on their XPS-8900 system?
I have a Dell XPS-8900 that I purchased a couple months ago and want to upgrade the M.2 SSD hard drive cache. The system has the 2TB 7200 rpm Hard Drive + 32GB M.2 SSD Cache, 16gb of memory (which I am upgrading to 32gb), and the i7-6700k processor.
I have been looking at replacing it with 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. Anyone know if this is correct?
If anyone has any thoughts on how I can tweak my system to squeeze a little more performance out of my system, I would greatly appreciate your ideas. It seems a little slow in startup and loading apps than what I expected.
ejn63
9 Legend
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87.5K Posts
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August 3rd, 2016 06:00
There is no point installing a larger drive for use as a cache -- it just won't do much (if anything) for performance. There IS a valid point in replacing the cache drive with a larger M.2 SSD and then installing the operating system to that drive (i.e., running in full native SSD mode). That WILL boost performance acceptably.
I doubt there's a limit on the drive capacity - but there likely is on the physical size of the card itself. Note that this system is NOT wired with a 4-lane PCIe interface -- so installing an NVMe drive is not worth the added cost, as it'll be throttled by the design of the mainboard.
mghassey
7 Posts
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August 3rd, 2016 09:00
The Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) system limits the cache size to 64GB anything above this size must be partitioned separately. I have just tried to upgrade to a Sandisk 64Gb M.2 SSD and the system couldn't even find a boot disc! The BIOS / UEFI recognised the bigger SSD & the HDD but status was given as non bootable.
Yes, if you have a bigger M.2 SSD preinstalled then there is a lot of benefit in using this as the system disc, thanks Dell (not) for selling these bigger SSDs just as a blank partition!
If you do not have a bigger SSD already the far simpler & easier method is to spend your money on a standard SATA SSD with cloning s/w & instal it in a spare slot in your XPS8900. My system has a single 3.5" 2TB disc and the 2nd HDD slot is empty, the 8900 chassis also comes with the mechanical & electrics where traditionally a 3.5 floppy drive would go. (So why is the Intel RAID system activated with only a single HDD installed Dell?) Some people do seem to have 2 x 1TB HDDsin their system.
I'm just about to do exactly that - wish me luck!