15 R3, upgrade my SSD

Yes, that drive will work.

I suggest that you do a full disk backup (disk image) followed by restoring that backup image to the new drive. Backup and restore is much safer than cloning. You may use an application such as Macrium Reflect or Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (formerly Acronis True Image)

I am not a fan of cloning. Cloning is an "all or nothing" process. If something goes wrong, the user may end up with two unbootable drives and loss of data. Backup/imaging and recovery is a far safer method, and allows for multiple tries if the user is unfamiliar. Cloning has no advantage over full backup and restore, except a slight time saving at the expense of considerably more risk and complexity.

You may make a full disk backup from the old drive to an external drive. Then, after removing the old drive and installing the new drive, you would restore the backup to the new drive. If anything went wrong, you would still have the backup to try again. If you're set on cloning, this is how to do it better:

1. Remove the old drive and connect it to the external interface.
2. Install the new drive into the laptop.
3. Clone the old drive to the new drive.
4. Disconnect the external interface.
5. Boot from the new drive (internally).
6. Do not reinstall the old drive as a secondary drive until you successfully boot from the new drive.

Irrespective of what partitions you have, the safest type of backup image is a full disk image. A full disk image, whereby you select the entire drive rather than individual partitions, will include everything needed for disaster recovery.

Whenever touching components or working inside a computer, wear a grounded wrist strap, also called anti-static wrist strap, ESD wrist strap, or ground bracelet. It's a cheap and sensible precaution. Rest the laptop on an anti-static mat or at least a reasonable alternative such as corrugated cardboard.

Hi @TiRohn welcome to this free user-to-user Alienware laptop discussion forum. 

The Crucial System Advisor database is a good source of information: Alienware 15 R3 | Memory RAM & SSD Upgrades | Crucial.com.  

Support for Alienware 15 R3 Storage says there are two M.2 2280 PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe slots and the Crucial database says that both of these slots will accept a 4TB M.2 2280 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe SSD. However, both slots are designed to run at PCIe 3.0 speed and the 2TB Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD is backward compatible to run at PCIe 3.0 speed. 

My Alienware 17 R5 Storage has been upgraded to have 2TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus PCIe Gen 3.0 x4 NVMe SSD. The new drive clone (copy) process was used to update the drive partition format from the old MBR to the modern GPT so that the BIOS boot list option UEFI was enabled. All software licences and files were retained during the clone process. (Macrium Reflect Free, or similar is adequate.) The other M.2 2280 slot was used during clone (copy). There are many videos of how to clone on YouTube and placement of neighbouring partitions on new SSD, so that partitions can be combined and increase in size. 

To convert a disk from MBR to GPT during clone (copy)

As part of my disaster recovery plan, a duplicate standby OS (C:) SSD was created so that if original boot drive became unrecoverable, the standby could be installed within minutes to get system running again. The OS (C:) SSD boot drive is always less than half full, so that there is plenty of room for temporary GPU files to be quickly unpacked and used. 

Alienware 15 R3 with Base cover removed.

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@filbert  schrieb:

Yes, that drive will work.

I suggest that you do a full disk backup (disk image) followed by restoring that backup image to the new drive. Backup and restore is much safer than cloning. You may use an application such as Macrium Reflect or Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office (formerly Acronis True Image)

I am not a fan of cloning. Cloning is an "all or nothing" process. If something goes wrong, the user may end up with two unbootable drives and loss of data. Backup/imaging and recovery is a far safer method, and allows for multiple tries if the user is unfamiliar. Cloning has no advantage over full backup and restore, except a slight time saving at the expense of considerably more risk and complexity.

You may make a full disk backup from the old drive to an external drive. Then, after removing the old drive and installing the new drive, you would restore the backup to the new drive. If anything went wrong, you would still have the backup to try again. If you're set on cloning, this is how to do it better:

1. Remove the old drive and connect it to the external interface.
2. Install the new drive into the laptop.
3. Clone the old drive to the new drive.
4. Disconnect the external interface.
5. Boot from the new drive (internally).
6. Do not reinstall the old drive as a secondary drive until you successfully boot from the new drive.

Irrespective of what partitions you have, the safest type of backup image is a full disk image. A full disk image, whereby you select the entire drive rather than individual partitions, will include everything needed for disaster recovery.

Whenever touching components or working inside a computer, wear a grounded wrist strap, also called anti-static wrist strap, ESD wrist strap, or ground bracelet. It's a cheap and sensible precaution. Rest the laptop on an anti-static mat or at least a reasonable alternative such as corrugated cardboard.

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Hi @filbert 

Thank you very mich for the detailed answer. I do have Acronis Cyber Home in action already for ma file backup, so I might end up using this app then.

If I understand correctly, I would need to have a boot medium after the switch of the SSDs so that I can restore the image to the new drive, correct?

Do I have to pre-format the new drive somehow first, or check my BIOS settings? In the answer from @crimsom there’s something about GPT and MBR and this is a bit confusing for me, sorry about that.

Also, I read some articles about the Samsung which don’t sound very good, so I checked another drive, the Seagate FireCuda 530. According to the specs, I would assume that this drive would work as well, does anyone of you have an opinion on that drive?

Again, thanks very much,

TiRohn

Hi @crimsom 

Awesome, thank you very mich for your detailed answer and help!

I will gladly buy myself some new SSD now and get my system on it soon.

Kind regards

TiRohn

Hi @TiRohn please remember to update this thread with what new drives are installed for the benefit of other Dell Community users. Thank you. 

The 2TB Samsung 980 PRO PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD and the 4TB Samsung 990 PRO PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe SSD are both backward compatible to run at PCIe 3.0 speed within the Alienware 15 R3. The 2TB 980 PRO and 4TB 990 PRO both have parts on one side only and use nickel coating to help manage the controller's heat level and a heat spreader label to deliver effective thermal control of the NAND chip. 

The CPUID HWMonitor will capture system heat sensor information, including drive temperatures. HWMONITOR | Softwares | CPUID.  

Hello! I was able to successfully upgrade my Alienware 15 R3 laptop storage upgrades with the following:

1 x 2TB m.2 NVME Samsung 970 Evo Plus SSD drive (in open NVME slot)

1 x 1TB m.2 2230 NVME Sabrent SSD drive in SSD-1 expansion slot (it is actually a 42mm slot but I found an extension plate to let me secure the drive properly 

1 x 4TB Corsair SSD 2.5" SATA drive in existing drive bay (was able to confirm options from Corsair's website). 

My factory configuration came with a 1 TB Toshiba m.2 NVME SSD drive and a 1 TB 7200 RPM Sata Drive. So I essentially went from 2 TB of storage across 2 drives to 8 TB of storage across 4 drives! I also am planning on using the clone utility from Samsung to upgrade my existing 1TB m.2 NVME boot drive for a total of 9 TB of storage. This will be great for my field work and archiving video & image files on the Sata SSD drive. 

Other notes:

I saw a video on what to do with the smaller SSD m.2 slot. The video is wrong!

https://youtu.be/ZonwecwHZ60
(@9:30)

They tried fitting a B+M card into the SSD-1 slot which is for a standard M card. The only catch is that the SSD-1 m.2 slot is 42mm long and not 30mm long as referenced in this discussion thread. That means if you get a M.2 NVME 2230 card (which is what I did after reading this thread), it will not secure into the slot because it doesn't reach the screw housing. Thankfully, I found an extension plate on Amazon for $10- https://a.co/d/16UM3Rm

If considering a 2.5" Sata SSD upgrade from Crucial, they make it easy by filtering options based on your laptop. Here is the link to choose the right upgrade options for the Alienware 15 R3 laptop: 

Alienware Alienware 15 R3 | Memory RAM & SSD Upgrades | Crucial.com

Cheers!