Laptop SSD Drive Upgrade and Battery Replacement (Dell XPS 13 9360) - Detailed Walkthrough

A detailed, beginner friendly video tutorial showing how to upgrade your SSD without reinstalling Windows, using only free and open source software.

The same general procedure applies for other computers / PCs / laptops / Operating systems too, including Apple Macs, UNIX, and, Linux machines.

For moving to a smaller drive (assuming your data will fit), before the cloning step with balenaEtcher you need to shrink the partitions as small as possible, keeping the start sector of the boot partition constant, then enlarge them to fill the new drive after cloning the same as shown.

Software I used:

- Dell/Toshiba SSD Firmware: https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-...

- Ubuntu Live Image: https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop

- usbimager: https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/usbimager/

- Balena Etcher (note, can also be used on windows instead of usbimager: https://etcher.balena.io/#download-et...

- GParted Live (I used Ubuntu, but if you only need to resize partitions its handy): https://gparted.org/download.php


Parts I used:

- Crucial P3 2TB SSD:
https://www.crucial.com/ssd/p3/CT2000...

- Orico USB NVMe Enclosure
https://www.orico.cc/usmobile/product...

- Dell PW23Y / TP1GT / RNP72 4-CELL 2S2P 7.6V 60Wh Battery
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-...

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Chapters

0:00 - Intro
1:00 - Parts (Unboxing & Preparation)
5:46 - Disable Device Encryption
6:40 - Update BIOS and Drivers
9:56 - Download Ubuntu
10:46 - Download usbimager
11:45 - Create Ubuntu Live USB
12:52 - uEFI / BIOS Configuration
16:44 - Booting Ubuntu from USB
18:43 - balenaEtcher - Download & Install
20:29 - balenaEtcher - Clone Drive
22:50 - GParted - Update Partitions
26:39 - Install New SSD & Battery
34:57 - Revert SATA Mode to RAID On
36:05 - Success!

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Backstory

My wife's laptop was getting a bit long in the tooth. The hard drive had completely filled up (had to move stuff to an external drive so there was space for the page file!) so she was using an SD card for extra storage, and the battery was down to 64% of its original capacity.

So, it was time for an upgrade. After a bit of research most of the video tutorials on youtube recommended the same proprietary 10 day trial software (I presume these videos were paid for by the company that sells the software), so I thought I'd set the record straight as it can be done completely with free and open source software.

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Red Hot Tips

Review the Dell Service Manuals: https://www.dell.com/support/manuals/...

A few things to check to make sure your new drive will work:

- Physical/Mechanical Requirements:
Width and Length: this machine took a 2280 (22mm x 80mm) size ssd.

M.2 Key: B or M.Most drives these days are both Key M and Key B. Key B is usually for SATA or PCIe x2, while key M are PCIe x4 (see below).

- Electronic Requirements: NVMe + PCIe vs AHCI + SATA

You should go with NVMe + PCIe if your laptop supports it.

NVMe and AHCI are two different communication protocols for hard drives (like languages for humans). NVMe is newer and much, much faster than AHCI.

SATA and PCIe are two different types of interface, (think Semaphore vs Morse Code) with PCIe being capable of much, much higher speeds than SATA.

Mostly, NVMe drives will operate over PCIe, and AHCI drives will operate over SATA. Some SSDs support both.

All PCIe and SATA versions are backward compatible, so as long as the drive and your laptop both support PCIe or both support SATA, it will work. The higher the version, the faster the speed, which will improve responsiveness, startup times, and generally make it snappier.

PCIe also has a number of lanes (indicated by xN, such as x2 or x4), where more lanes means more speed and again these are downward compatible, they'll just run slower.

Even though this laptop has an M.2 Key M connector and PCIe x4 interface, the maximum speed is only equivalent to PCIe x2. See:
https://winraid.level1techs.com/t/gui...

For more info on, SATA, AHCI, PCIe, and NVMe, see: https://sabrent.com/blogs/storage/m-2...
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/art...

Intel RAID On is a proprietary hardware drive controller, which means the OS (Windows) doesn't control the drive directly. This is used by default on Dell laptops for legacy compatibility reasons, but it is of no benefit to a modern OS that supports NVMe in a laptop with a single storage drive.

If you are doing a clean install of Windows 10, set it to AHCI. See this Dell support forum post for more info: https://www.dell.com/community/en/con...