Advice on upgrading HDD to SSD on Dell XPS 8900

I have a Dell XPS 8900/Windows 10 (20H2) with a 1 TB HD that has the operating system and also a 4 TB HD that I use for storage. I want to replace the 1 TB with a 1 TB SSD. I know I will need to purchase an adaptor to install in a 3.5" bay. I was planning on purchasing a Samsung EVO drive. Do I need to go into Disk Management first before I do anything else or can I just use Macrium Reflect to clone my existing 1 TB drive, swap them out and and the ssd will boot up with no issues? I obviously want the process to be easy and painless as possible. Thanks in advance for ideas/suggestions.

I've never had an issue with cloning. Install the SSD. Leave the HDD installed. Install Macrium Reflect. Clone the HDD to the SSD. Hold down the shift key when you click on Shutdown in Windows after cloning. Remove either the power or data cable from the HDD and boot the computer from the SSD. It is a good idea to have a Macrium Reflect Rescue USB flash drive created because sometimes the cloned SSD won't boot until you boot from the Macrium Reflect Rescue drive and run the Fix Windows boot problems utility from the restore menu.

If you want to reuse the HDD in the same computer, you will need to change it's disk signature (Disk GUID) because it could be the same as the new SSD causing a collision error.

Your computer has an M.2 pcie 3.0 X1 slot, this gives a maximum read / write 1 Gb / s.
And you might get more with an M.2 to PCIe adapter to x4 PCIe slots card.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-D...n/td-p/6203474

itsme1 said:

Your computer has an M.2 pcie 3.0 X1 slot, this gives a maximum read / write 1 Gb / s.
And you might get more with an M.2 to PCIe adapter to x4 PCIe slots card.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-D...n/td-p/6203474

I'm slightly surprised that an M.2 slot that supports NVME is only PCI-E X1, but that shows up in numerous places in a web search.

I wonder whether "tenofhearts12" is prepared to deal with the M.2 slot, or na M.2 card in a PCI-E X4 adapter? Even a 2.5" SATA drive would give a great improvement. The M.2's speed may show up more in benchmarks than in normal use.

If "tenofhearts12" wants the M.2 slot, I did a quick google search, especially in amazon, the 1to ssd and nvme ssd are around $ 100.

itsme1 said:

Your computer has an M.2 pcie 3.0 X1 slot, this gives a maximum read / write 1 Gb / s.
And you might get more with an M.2 to PCIe adapter to x4 PCIe slots card.
https://www.dell.com/community/XPS-D...n/td-p/6203474

I would be careful with the solution presented in that link:

3. It should work fine.
a. PCIe/NVMe is an industry standard like SATA.
b. XPS-8900 is UEFI based, so booting of NVMe SSDs from a PCIe Addin Card should work.

Just because a computer has UEFI does NOT mean that it will boot from an NVMe SSD. The UEFI firmware must support the NVMe interface. If the computer does not have a built-in M.2 slot with NVMe support, it likely will NOT have NVMe interface support built in the UEFI firmware and won't boot from NMVe. If the XPS-8900 has the M.2 slot that supports an NVMe drive, then it likely would boot from an NVMe add-on card.

Thanks so much to everyone who has responded. What I was hoping I can do is an either/or of 2 different ways with Macrium Reflectt Free which I have used for a few years now:

1. Attach ssd to my computer as a external hard drive, clone my HD to ssd, remove HD, install ssd and boot.

2. Remove the 4 TB secondary drive I'm using for storage, install the ssd in its place, clone my primary drive to the ssd, remove HD, install ssd and reinstall 4 TB storage drive.

Will either of those 2 work?

Thanks!

Since it appears you don't want to keep the primary HDD installed in the computer, do you have enough free space on the 4 TB HDD to store an image of the primary HDD?