I recently purchased a used Dell XPS 13 (model 9360), and I chose to purchase the base option (with 128 GB SSD) since it was cheaper to do that and upgrade the SSD to a larger model (500 GB) aftermarket than to buy a higher model XPS (I bought this model: ).I've upgraded drives in many Macs and on Linux PCs over the years, and the process is pretty painless, with a plethora of freely available options for disk cloning (e.g. Disk Utility on macOS, dd on Linux or macOS, etc.). But on Windows, it seems there's nothing built-in for cloning or imaging a disk—instead you have to download and/or purchase a utility to help with this process. Annoying, but in the end it worked out, so I won't get too angry about it.Tools used: Spudger, #000 phillips screwdriver, T5 Torx screwdriver.I tried both and, and found Macrium Reflect to be a little easier to work with. There are countless tutorials on the Internet for how to do a disk clone, but I wanted to point out the process I used since there were a few gotchas:.
I tried cloning the internal drive to my new M.2 SSD mounted inside an SATA-to-NVMe/M.2 adapter, which was then plugged into a USB 3.1-to-SATA adapter. @Tim - I have a pretty substantial review of the XPS 13 in draft mode right now.
Waiting on some time to finish it up though. I'm not using it as my daily workstation, but still have been trying it out for longer periods of time to see what I like/hate about it. More to come.Haven't decided on dual-booting Linux yet. For now, VirtualBox satisfies that need, but I do want to have a native Linux distro (probably either Fedora or Ubuntu) running on it for testing purposes.
But that means more partitioning and UEFI stuff, and I hate how complicated that can be (and how easy it is to accidentally lose your Windows license for an Authentic Windows Experience™!). I want to echo Ian Hurrell's comment from 4 months ago.Thank you indeed, upgraded my XPS SSD from 128GB to 256GB. Very helpful guide, special thanks for including the part about merging partitions to make the new additional space accessible.
With my version of EaseUS, I could drag the partitions as you describe to position the 'Unallocated Space' next to the boot partition (C:). Before I could merge, I had to make the 'Unallocated Space' a named partition ('create partition') That created new drive letter E.
Then I could select both C: and E: for merge, with C: as the destination (EaseUS forces destination to be C: - very nice). Again, thanks for a great job.
Thank you for writing this guide, it was very helpful!I did encounter a problem when it came to merging partitions. Once I had the new SSD installed, and had the software, when I hit merge and apply, my laptop could not restart properly.
It said that I would need to use recovery tools and installation media, but I had copied windows 10 onto a USB and had it plugged it at the time. I switched back to my old SSD but still need to use my new one at some point. If you have any advice, please let me know!. Thanks so much for the excellent video. It made it easy for me to pop out the original SSD (256 GB) and replace with a new 1TB SSD. I might offer 2 suggestions:1. Before purchasing the SSD upgrade, actually open up the laptop and check whether you have an M2 NVME or M2 SATA SSD.
Dell Xps 8700 Hard Drive Installation
In my case, I blindly ordered a SATA and the transfer speeds are 4x faster with NVME and now not much different in price. The performance is still comparable to SATA HDD, but you never can get fast enough;)2. For me, the EaseUS step had a hitch in it. For some reason, I could not drag and drop for moving partitions to the right of the unallocated space, which was 693GB in my case. However, after selecting the partition immediately to the left of Unallocated, clicking Resize/Move, then instead of dragging I clicked on 'Advanced Settings' and then set 'Unallocated after: 0.00 GB' which had the effect of moving Unallocated to the left of this partition. I repeated it 2 more times to move Unallocated just to the right of C:OS and then merged.But this video and writeup made it so simple and I especially liked the tip to use my small spudger to unsnap the case from the front edge.Like the others, MANY THANKS!. For potential XPS13 buyers.
I bought an XPS13 for my wife four years ago. It is a nice machine but very well built. So far the battery has been replaced once and it claims it needs to be replaced again. The display has developed a gliding shade and with columns, the touchpad has been replaced (the click mechanism failed), the DC in jack is on its last legs. And not the SSD (256GB) is reporting failure. Not what I expected from a 1600 EUR laptop, I could have bought a MacBook Pro for that price: we have three of those in our household and none of them have failed like the XPS13. Thanks for this guide, followed it through and successfully installed and cloned my 1TB drive on XPS15.
A couple of thoughts:- It is worth checking what type slot you have for your internal HD, this can easily be done by opening the back and checking the serial numbers etc of your existing HD and even taking it out. Do this before ordering another one!- I had to create an image of my existing HD, not a clone (following the external HD transfer method above) as the free version of the tool would not support cloning from the boot USB in the free version.- Beware that there you need to find the 'free' version of EaseUS partition manager and not the 'trial' version, as the latter won't allow you to make partition changes.Thanks again for the step-by-step guide.