DELL XPS 8930 Upgrade SSD M.2 and Add SATA SSD

Hi - I wonder if anyone can help please. I have a Dell XPS 8930. It’s about 18 months old. I’m very happy with the PC, especially now the fan noise is under better control. My Dell came with a Toshiba SSD NVMe M.2 256 GB and a HDD. Win 10 Pro (v1909) sits on the Toshiba M.2 SSD and my data files are on the HDD. The M.2 SSD is getting a little low on free space so I’ve bought a higher capacity (500 GB) Samsung M.2 SSD. Having suffered disc failure in the past I also have a Samsung SATA SSD which will fit in one of the spare drive bays. I will clone (not mirror) the M2. SSD to the SATA SSD weekly for extra protection.

My intention is to:

1) Fit the SATA SSD in one of the spare drive bays; 2) Restore an image of the existing Toshiba M.2 SSD to the new SATA SSD;
3) Remove the Toshiba M.2 SSD;
4) Reboot from the new SATA SSD (Q – does this require any change to settings?); 5) Fit the Samsung M.2 SSD and clone from SATA SSD.
6) Reboot, enter BIOS and change boot order to Samsung M.2 SSD. This all seems a bit too straightforward and I’m sure there are other things I need to do to make sure everything works o.k. and in particular the PC boots correctly at stages 4 and 6. For example, the SATA option in my BIOS is set to RAID, and I did read that I might have to change that to AHCI but at what stage.


I use Macrium Reflect Home Edition for image files and cloning, and have created a rescue disc.
Any thoughts\suggestions gratefully received. Thank you.

Many thanks. Interesting solution but I've opened the packaging on the Samsung SSDs so will have to go with those.

I use Samsung SSD's in my desktop (EVO 850 and EVO 860) and an M.2 in my Dell Inspiron 15 gaming laptop.
I upgraded the Dell from the 256GB that came with the PC to a Samsung 512.

My procedure, using Macrium Reflect, was make a full disc image (all partitions and important to do this) to a USB connected drive.
Swapped the M.2 SSD's. Booted with a Macrium rescue flash drive. Restored the created disc image to the new M.2 SSD. Booted the system to check that the image restore went well. Then used MiniTool Partition Wizard program to recover the unused partition space to the "C" Partition (whether you image or clone you need to do that as the restored image or cloned image is only the size of the original drive).

I don't use clone as its iffy. Disc image method has worked every time for me.