This is the very last upgrade.... ever.

For my Dell XPS 15.

Probably*.

It started out with a 1TB HDD and a 32GB mSATA cache drive that, thanks to some clever software was able to store all the bits of Windows etc that were needed frequently and present them to the processor at SSD speeds. Performance out of the box was fantastic, making the 6 YO Macbook with SSD it replaced look like it was steam-powered.

Then came the photos, and it began running out of space on the HDD. In search of a little more performance and a little more space, the HDD was replaced with a 1TB Sandisk SSD and the 32GB mSATA card with a 256GB mSATA. This was excellent, with startup in under 20sec and was probably about the fastest it could ever be. It had a bit more space than might have been expected too, because I was able to do a fresh install of W10, ditching some of the cruft & unused applications, data remaining from the upgrade from W8 to W10 etc, and I gained more space than a simple mirroring of drives might have provided.

But as night follows day, so drive space fills up.

First off I ended up literally filling the 1TB drive to the last couple of GB with a combination of images and data, so it was swapped (with some disappointment) to a 2TB HDD, and there was a distinct performance hit, even though all the OS files were on the SSD boot drive. Then I realised that had filled up too, and I ended up deleting quite a lot of data & applications, plus during one of the W10 'upgrades' the drive had been further partitioned, wasting space.

More room was needed.

Now unfortunately mSATA drives are 'old tech', out of fashion and superceded by NVME spec drives. Prices were actually holding up better than newer, more consumer oriented drives. I'd been watching the price of obsolete 1TB mSATA drives for some time, afraid they were going to become unobtainable, unwilling to spend £150 on another drive. Then a few weeks back Amazon Italy (why Italy? who knows?) did a special deal offering Samsung 860 drives (the only remaining 1TB mSATA drives now available) for about £97, and while looking at the offer page clicked what I thought (really did) was the link for translating into GB Pounds, that was actually 'buy this in GB Pounds'.

So as a result of that happy accident I've just finished Doing a clean install of W10 build 1903, and having sorted out the various system framework drivers (Dell's good drivers are older than the generic versions Windows automatically installed that badly throttle the system, so wouldn't install automatically) etc it works really nicely. Finally did that + sort out emails last night.

So, a couple more years use, hopefully, by which time the machine will be 7, 8 years old and still fast and effective.

* If memory prices keep dropping then a 4TB storage SSD would be tempting. ;-)