Picked up an new M2 SSD Hard Drive. I have 2 drives in my Dell 7710 laptop right now. The boot drive is a 256GB Samsung SM951 M2 drive. Older tech for M2 drives. I have a 2.5" spinner 1TB Samsung Spinpoint M8 drive. I put this one into my computer to back up the boot drive.
The M2 drive is getting full, I have less than 10% left before it's full so I decided to get another M2 drive. I've been eying the Samsung Pro 960 for a while now and it was about $325 for a 512GB. A bit on the expensive side. After waiting for some time a Pro 970 came out which was less expensive and faster. So I decided I'd do that one. I still waited, probably 4 months. The price kept coming down, going up and then down again. Finally it reached $170 and I got it.
It showed up today and all I needed was an M2x2.5mm screw. Got one at the hardware store, it was 12mm long so I just cut it.
Installed it in the laptop as my 3rd drive. Rebooted the computer, took a while for the Dell logo to come up. Figured it was configuring it. I expected a new hardware message, drivers loading etc. But it booted straight into Windows. I checked the files and no new drive. No joy for me.
So I went into the Intel Rapid Storage Technology program which shows me what's going on with my drives. It didn't show up in there. Less joy.
So I rebooted and went into the BIOS and it was listed there. Nothing to save because I didn't change anything. Rebooted. I checked for the drive and nothing. Went to the Rapid Storage program and it showed there. But all I can do there is RAID stuff, join drives, make arrays and such, but that's not what I wanted to do.
So I went into disk management and it sees the drive also. I gave it a volume, assigned a letter and did a quick format. Now there was joy. I had my new drive.
Before I did anything I checked out the speed with Crystal Disk Mark 5.
And the new 970 M2 drive is 1.72x as fast as my old SM 951. I CDM5 my 1TB spinner just for fun and the results are just laughable.
After that was time to clone the drive and swap the new drive to C: as the boot.
I used Macrium Reflect to clone the drive. Took 25 minutes 22 seconds to clone the 256GB drive to the new 512GB drive. Rebooted into the BIOS and swapped the old drive to the new for the boot drive. Easy as placing a check mark in a box.
Rebooted and it fired right up. I went to the disk management program to confirm that the new drive was the boot drive and it was.
Mission accomplished.
| RAM | 1 TB |
|---|---|
| Hard Drive | 1 TB Solid State Hard Drive |
