Installing an SSD in an old Dell XPS 27

by philg

We had an original 2011 Dell XPS 27 all-in-one computer that was absurdly slow to boot and then, once booted, spent 10-20 minutes grinding away at 100 percent disk updating Dropbox, Microsoft antivirus definitions, Windows updates, etc. (I’m not sure that the latest Dell products would be any better; most of them proudly ship with mechanical hard drives and can’t even be configured from the factory with SSDs.)

It was time either to pull an Elvis (gunshot to the screen) or replace the sluggish mechanical drive with an SSD. How to avoid reinstalling everything? The motherboard has an mSATA slot that had held a 32 GB SSD for cache. We disabled this from the Intel Rapid Storage Technology software. Then we opened up the case (two screws) and removed an internal system board shield (eight screws?) and the mSATA (two screws). The new mSATA 1 TB drive from Amazon (about $300) went in and the machine started right up.

We installed the free version of Macrium Reflect and cloned the hard drive to the SSD while the system was running(!). Maybe the disk cloning software understands NTFS journaling and is taking a consistent point-in-time snapshot of the hard drive? The mechanical hard drive contained about 330 GB of information and the cloning process took approximately 2 hours. After that, it booted right up from the SSD!

What better Valetine’s Day gift to a loved one than 20 extra minutes per day not waiting for a 7200 rpm drive to spin around?

 

7 thoughts on “Installing an SSD in an old Dell XPS 27”

  1. I have that same EVO hard drive. The difference you notice with a PC performance by swapping the old mechanical hard drive with an SSD is night and day. However, be careful, not all SSD are equal, some, like the EVO, will outperform other brands.

    With regards to cloning the OS over to the new hard drive, it is better to install everything fresh because that too will give you cleaner system that will outperform the cloned one. What I have done for years now (over 20+ years) is partitioned my hard drive into at least 5 partitions like so:

    C Drive: Is where all the OS stuff is
    D Drive: Is where I install all of my applications (never use the Windows default of “Program Files”. I create 3 key folders on this drive, APPS, DEVS, DATA. In each, I install software related to what they are used for, for example: D:\APPS\VideoLAN, D:\DEVS\JPSoft, D:\DATA\JavaDoc
    E Drive: Is where I place all my work related data (there is a folder per project, version, etc).
    F Drive: Is my temp drive is where I place stuff that I will scrap in days, or weeks.
    G Drive: Is my private files is where I encrypt the partition and has stuff personal to me.

    One note about the E drive (the temp stuff). This is also where I create folders in this partition such as “temp” and “tmp” and then I change Windows environment variable so that the temp path as well as the pagefile.sys is now located.

    The main advantage of this setup is if I have to backup anything, I know what to backup. If I have to reinstall the entire OS, I know what to restore, and having partitions, helps the OS a bit because it can find things faster by looking into a partition with a small index vs. one large one.

    Yes, I’m setting up Windows similar to how Linux did it for ages (hint: Linux partitions the hard drive into TMP and USER spaces).

  5. The first time I saw a 1TB Oracle database it took up many, many racks of loudly spinning disks in a temperature controlled data center and cost $gazillion.

  6. I did the same thing to my daughter’s Lenovo as soon as it arrived. I saved the clone image so it can always be used to restore the machine to factory. There was only a 42mm slot available so the biggest SSD you can get is 512gb. OS and progs are on the SSD and the old spinner gets used for data storage.

    I think the reason the mfrs keep specifying HD’s as standard is because they really make a lot of $ marking up the optional SSDs. Anyone paying with his own $ does the upgrade himself but in a corporate setting, it’s someone else’s $ and you have to pay labor to reinstall so they just pay the exorbitant upgrade fee for the SSD. Otherwise an SSD is a no brainer.

    The only warning is do frequent backups. SSDs do not fail gracefully and are pretty much unrecoverable. One day you will press the power switch and nothing will happen and your data will never be seen again. Poof -gone, unless you have a backup. HDs will often give some warning – sectors going bad, etc. and there are various means for recovering them even after they are no longer bootable.

  7. This is an upgrade that I recommend to everyone that actually uses their PC. I’ve probably done a similar process on about 60 systems.

    I am sort of lazy and usually use the Samsung Data Migration software. (only works with Samsung SSDs). It also clones the disk while Windows is running, and works well enough that I have forgotten about the old days of using a boot up disk.

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