Dell XPS 15 (9550) dual SSD

Question

I recently opened up my Dell XPS 15 9550 to blow out some of the dust, and was surprised by the presence of an empty SATA bay next to the smaller 56 Whr battery. I only opted for the 256GB M.2 drive when I bought it, and with SSD prices falling, I purchased a 1TB Samsung 860 EVO drive to stick in there as well.

My plan is to stuff my existing Windows installation and larger files/programs onto the Samsung drive and put a lightweight Linux distro on the smaller drive for a clean dual boot system.

My question is simple: how should I go about making this happen? Most critically, what settings do I need to enable in the BIOS (RAID vs. AHCI) and how will Intel RST interpret everything? On another note, will the computer even be able to know both drives are installed and boot from both?

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Update for those who are thinking of making this same upgrade:

Installation of the new EVO SSD was very straightforward, thanks to a HDD caddy ordered from eBay (https://ebay.to/2KNz8E6) and took about 5 minutes. Both drives are set up to use AHCI, and I put a fresh copy of Windows on the PCIe drive. I opted to use the EVO as a secondary drive with two partitions: an NTFS partition for extra media storage, larger programs, and backup; and a secondary ext4 partition with a small Ubuntu installation.

The EVO drive is very fast and hasn't resulted in a noticeable battery drain. With plenty of free space on the PCIe drive now, general system performance seems a bit quicker as well. After doing my own research, the use of RAID or AHCI doesn't particularly impact overall SSD performance, and RAID would only be the preferable option if I had two similarly spec'ed drives to run in either a RAID 0 or 1 array (which obviously doesn't apply to this laptop).