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XPS 8930, SATA HDD replacement/retrofit recommendation?
I have a ca 2019 XPS 8930 (i7 9700K Coffee Lake - SE? Silver Front Cover - 32 GB RAM). I need to replace/retrofit the Seagate SATA 2TB HD (OS) asap. Image below of orig. HD. I want to do this without any "trial and error" and without any problems working with existing system. I don't need to have a larger capacity HD but if there is one currently/readily avail. that works without any trouble that would be fine. I had recently read the Toshiba are of a "better quality" as well so that would be an option if there was a retrofit. As well, I checked with some online vendors and there weren't any Barracudas that had the same model(?) # as mine which is ST2000DM001. There were some that had #ST2000DMA08 or ST2000NM0008 (enterprise)...but wasn't sure if these would be "exact replacement". I'm not a computer guy do don't really know what these suffixes mean. Note that the PSU is being changed to SeaSonic FOCUS Plus 80-PLUS Platinum.
Vic384
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March 27th, 2020 12:00
It appears that the OS is on Disk 0, the 2 TB Seagate hard drive. Replacing it with a Seagate ST2000DMA08 would work or if you are willing to pay about twice as much a Western Digital Black WD2003FZEX. The Western Digital is probably more reliable with a 5 year vs 2 year warranty. The original Seagate ST2000DM001 is basically an OEM drive with a 1 year warranty. The IT business should be able to replace your hard drive easily.
I cannot tell from the Disk Management results if the SSD is used as Optane memory. The base configuration for the XPS 8930 SE today is for the SSD to have the OS and be the boot drive; Dell does not appear to be pushing Optane memory as much.
Your Disk Management also shows what appears to be three additional drives; it is possilbe they are USB drives used for external storage.
garioch7
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March 27th, 2020 08:00
@canhill
Any SATA HDD of the same size should fit in nicely without any issues. Your XPS 8930 is booting from the SSD, not the HDD, so swapping HDDs is not an issue. You should copy over any data you want off that drive to a USB flash drive; or, temporarily copy it to the C: drive (SSD), for moving back to the new HDD.
Seagate has at least one class action suit against it for defective HDDs. I have had great success with Western Digitals, but from what I read, the Toshiba products are great too. Although there is a Seagate in my XPS 8930 SE because that is what it shipped with, I would personally never purchase a Seagate HDD. That said, some older Seagate drives were quite reliable. The Seagate HDD in my ancient Dell Studio XPS 1645 has been ticking away for ten years now, and counting, without an issue.
I hope this helps. Have a great day.
Regards,
-Phil
canhill
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March 27th, 2020 08:00
@garioch7Thanks. Additional question, again, not a computer guy. My computer drive tree shows "C" as the the Seagate 2TB HD, not the smaller SSD (which is called DATAPART1)? So isn't it booting from the Seagate?
garioch7
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March 27th, 2020 09:00
@canhill
That would be an unusual arrangement to have the computer booting off of a slower mechanical drive? I have not seen that before.
Please right click the "Start" icon at the lower left of your screen, and select "Disk Management." Your boot drive (Disk) will show a number of partitions created by Windows to enable booting and recovery.
My boot drive is Disk 2. Disk 0 is a 2 TB HDD and Disk 1 is a 1 TB SSD that I use for backups. You can readily see that my Disk 2 is the boot drive from the number and names of the partitions created on the boot disk.
I hope this helps. Have a great day.
Regards,
-Phil
Vic384
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March 27th, 2020 09:00
@canhill I think your problem is a little more complicated. It is possible that the description of your system is incomplete. First you indicated that the OS is on the Seagate drive and then you did not mention the SSD. If you have a SSD it is possible the SSD is Optane memory used to cache the hard drive and speed it up and not as @garioch7 believes that the OS is on the SSD. Whie there are many possible SATA hard drives that will work as replacements, moving the OS and data to a new hard drive is not simple.
canhill
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March 27th, 2020 10:00
@garioch7 @Vic384 First, disk management screenshot. Regarding, the SSD. I don't remember any details about it and how it was utilized in this configuration. Here is the info. from the invoice "Solid State Drive,256,P 34,80S3,Technical Sheet,XG5" and from Device Manager "PM981 NVMe Samsung 256GB" - seem to remember the word Optane on the original purchase page but could not be for sure. Note that I am buying component parts and will have a small IT business do all the necessary install etc. etc.
canhill
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March 27th, 2020 13:00
@Vic384Thanks much, very helpful
speedstep
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March 27th, 2020 14:00
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-BarraCuda-Internal-Drive-3-5-Inch/dp/B07H2RR55Q/