New Alienware 13 - Problems with swapping in an SSD

Hey NBR, it has been quite a while, hope you all had a good Christmas!

I was fortunate to find a spanking new Alienware 13 under the tree today, and I've been trying to swap the 1tb HDD in it for my old laptop's Crucial M4 SSD, however I've discovered that the HDD used in the 13 is of a special 'slim' form factor, with the drive bay sized to accommodate this + the mounting bracket and nothing larger. Put simply, my SSD won't fit unless I try shoving it in without the mounting bracket, which seems like a bad idea.

Any other AW13 owners experiencing the same issue? Is there any solution?

Thanks

Benfclark.

 

The... AW13 only has 1 7mm bay. 9.5mm would not fit. Can't fit; won't fit.

Also, Crucial SSD probably won't work now anyway. There is a separate thread about AW13 and Crucial SSDs.

 

Well, bugger. I could swap the Crucial for my desktop's Samsung Evo 840, though it's a tad small at 250GB. Might be worth looking into buying a new SSD.

Thanks for the heads-up.

 

For the similar reason I bought the EVO 840 500gb during the sales. It's working fine, although I did go with Win 7 because I hate Win 8. The boot speed is a tad slower than Win 8.

 

I'm still baffled by the decision to use a 5400RPM hard drive instead of a 7200RPM one. Even my 2008 M15X had a 7200RPM HDD.

 

It's an SSHD. 5400RPM with 8gb SSD "flash". I know it's not much, but it certainly makes the boot speed similar to that of an SSD. I did run several games with it and it was definitely quicker than say, an HDD at 5400rpm or 7200rpm. This is not the sole 5400rpm that we used to use back in the day.

 

Wait, really? That's definitely a detail that I missed somewhere, thanks for the information.

 

Well, let me clarify this a little.

The base model comes with the SSHD (500gb + 8gb flash). The next model has an 1TB 5400RPM HDD for an additional 100 dollars. If you plan to upgrade to SSD, just get the base model. I honestly don't think that 500gb more for 5400rpm justifies 100 dollars more.

I placed the SSD into AW13 and use the SSHD for another laptop that originally had an HDD. Win-Win.

 

I've just realised something: I live in the UK, and as such I only had access to a slightly more limited set of customisation options, none of which was the hybrid drive that you mentioned.

 

That's true, not all options are available to all regions. The SSD has to be 7mm as stated above, just wanted to provide an official word on that.

 

Thanks for the clarification, Porras. If I were to upgrade to an SSD would I be better off doing a clean install from the included recovery USB, or should I use something like EaseUS Partition Master to clone the old drive? I see that there are a few recovery and diagnostic partitions in addition to the primary partition, and I was wondering if it would be a problem if I lost these.