Changing HD in Dell Inspiron 5370

I am going to update the HD in my Inspiron 5370 but am not used to doing this on a system with only one HD slot.

My plans it to clone the current SSD to a larger Samsung 970 Evo.

To do this, can I attach a 4TB external HD (or smaller) to one of the USB slots, clone to that and then take out the current SSD in the laptop, replace it with the blank 970 Evo and then clone from the external HD to the new NVMe HD?

Is there a better way? I have not found any cases with USB for M.2 NVMe PCIe HDs which would allow me to clone directly to the new HD.

Any suggestions welcome please.

Thank you.

 

Put your new drive in an external case, use AOMEI backupper and copy your drive to the new enclosure. then pop in your new SSD and enjoy!

 

Thanks, kojack. Your solution is the obvious way to do this but the problem is finding an enclosure for the NVMe PCIe SSD. There are quite a few enclosures for M.2 drives but most do not work with NVMe drives.

My current idea is to do one of the following:

1) Create Windows installation boot media on a USB drive, remove old M.2 drive, slot in new NVMe SSD, boot from USB and then reinstall the image from the USB.

2) Take out the M.2 and insert that into an USB enclosure, insert NVMe into laptop and then boot from the old M.2 on the USB connection and clone that drive to the NVMe.

Any thoughts on those two ideas?

 

Could you try booting using your cloning/backup media thumb drive, not into windows. Then, with the new nvme in your laptop and source drive in external caddy....

when the cloning software thumb drive asks for source, select the external and when it asks for Target, select the internal nvme

I may try that when i get home as experiment, not tried it yet. I use acronis thumb drive, fyi. I think their free version would work for you too when making bootable acronis media usb.

Edit: or try creating clone or backup to an external hdd. Then put new nvme into internal slot, boot up using clone/backup media thumb drive, restore from external hdd to internal nvme. i think this was your first plan which is a good plan. It makes a backup into hdd in addition to copying old system to new drive. That's always a good idea to have backup first anyway.

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